The Man Who Loved Children (7 page)

What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out! And what a moral, high-minded world their father saw! But for Henny there was a wonderful particular world, and when they went with her they saw it: they saw the fish eyes, the crocodile grins, the hair like a birch broom, the mean men crawling with maggots, and the children restless as an eel, that she saw. She did not often take them with her. She preferred to go out by herself and mooch to the bargain basements, and ask the young man in the library what was good to read, and take tea in some obscure restaurant, and wander desolately about, criticizing shopwindows and wondering if, in this street or that, she would yet, “old as I am and looking like a black hag,” meet her fate. Then she would come home, next to some girl “from a factory who looked like a lily and smelled like a skunk cabbage,” flirting with all the men and the men grinning back, next to some coarse, dirty workman who pushed against her in the car and smelled of sweat, or some leering brute who tried to pay her fare.

Louie would sit there, on the end of the bench, lost in visions, wondering how she would survive if some leering brute shamefully tried to pay her fare in a public car, admiring Henny for her strength of mind in the midst of such scandals: and convinced of the dreary, insulting horror of the low-down world. For it was not Henny alone who went through this inferno, but every woman, especially, for example, Mrs. Wilson, the woman who came to wash every Monday. Mrs. Wilson, too, “big as she was, big as an ox,” was insulted by great big brutes of workmen, with sweaty armpits, who gave her a leer, and Mrs. Wilson, too, had to tell grocers where they got off, and she too had to put little half-starved cats of girls, thin as toothpicks, in their places. Mrs. Wilson it was who saw the ravishing Charlotte Bolton (daughter of the lawyer, who lived in a lovely bungalow across the street), she saw “my lady, standing with her hands on her hips, waggling her bottom and laughing at a man like a common streetgirl,” and he “black as the inside of a hat, with dark blood for sure.” Louie and Evie, and the obliging little boys, tugging at the piles of greasy clothes on Mondays, puffing under piles of new-ironed linen on Tuesdays, would be silent for hours, observing this world of tragic faery in which all their adult friends lived. Sam, their father, had endless tales of friends, enemies, but most often they were good citizens, married to good wives, with good children (though untaught), but never did Sam meet anyone out of Henny’s world, grotesque, foul, loud-voiced, rude, uneducated, and insinuating, full of scandal, slander, and filth, financially deplorable and physically revolting, dubiously born, and going awry to a desquamating end.

After Henny had talked her heart out to her sister, Aunt Hassie, or to Bonnie even (though she despised a Pollit), or to her bosom friend, Miss Spearing, she would sometimes go, and after a silence, there would steal through the listening house flights of notes, rounded as doves, wheeling over housetops in the sleeping afternoon, Chopin or Brahms, escaping from Henny’s lingering, firm fingers. Sam could be vile but always as a joke. Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world, and when she told her children tales of the villainies they could understand, it was not to corrupt them, but because, for her, the world was really so. How could their father, said she, so fool them with his lies and nonsense?

The chair, and the slanting of the light, the endless insoluble game of solitaire, were as comfortable to Henny’s ravaged nerves as an eiderdown. In the warmth of the late afternoon, some time before she expected to hear the rush of feet, she would sit there at her third or fourth game and third or fourth cup of tea. So sitting she would seem to herself to be bathing in the warm moisture of other summers. She would see the near rush or distant slow-moving glitter on the steeps of North Charles Street, see the half-dry fountain with a boat in Eutaw Place, which could be seen from the front windows of the brownstone house Hassie had there, and the hot-smelling, rose-colored stoops flowing down and up the gully: see the masts of little boats and the barges, the sole twinkle of a car on the bridge; see the hot, washed windows of dressmakers and the tasseled curtains of a club, the dormant steps of little night bars, the yellow and pink of some afternoon-tea place where she had gone with Hassie when she was a schoolgirl. Or if the wind was high and her headache had not yet come on, she could smell the brackish and weakly salt streams of the Chesapeake, scudding in her cousin’s twelve-footer, or her father’s motorboat; feel the sounds and scents of Saturdays long swept away on the long rollers of years, when she was a thin-blooded, coquettish girl, making herself bleed at the nose for excitement, throwing herself on the lawns of Monocacy in a tantrum, spitting fire at the servants, coaxing her father, waiting for the silly toys her father would buy her—engagement to a commercial fortune, marriage to a great name, some unexpected stroke of luck in blue-blooded romance, social fun, nursemaids, two fashionable children in pink and blue. These things surged out of the past, as she sat there, but faintly, no more distinct than a wind that is blowing ten miles off and sometimes sends a puff of air. If she became conscious of these streams on the rainbow fringe of memory, she would bite her lip and flush, perhaps angry at her indulgent father for getting her the man he had got, angry at herself for having been so weak.

“Sadie was a lady,” she would suddenly say in the stillness, and, “Hrmph!” or, “If I had a ladida like that to deal with I’d drown her when a pup.” Besides, she could not even now forget the humiliation of having her name five or six years in old social calendars among the “eligibles”: nor of having married a man who was after all a mere jog-trot subaltern bureaucrat, dragged into the service in the lowest grades without a degree, from mere practical experience in the Maryland Conservation Commission, and who owed his jealousy-creating career to her father’s influence in the lobbies of the capital.

Soon Ernie, her favorite, would rush in, saying breathlessly, “Did it come out, Moth?” This kept her sitting there. While she sat and played or did her microscopic darning, sometimes a small mouse would run past, or even boldly stand and inquisitively stare at her. Henny would look down at its monstrous pointed little face calmly and go on with her work, while it pretended to run off, and took another stand, still curious, behind another chair leg. The mice were well fed. They regularly set traps, but there was no coming to the end of the mice in that house. Henny accepted the sooty little beings as house guests and would only go on the warpath at night, when she woke up suddenly to smell in the great hall, or even in her own bedroom, the musky penetrating odor of their passage: or when she looked at her little spectator and saw that it was a pregnant mother. She would have accepted everything else, too, the winds, the rattlings and creaking of the old house, the toothaches and headaches, the insane anxieties about cancer and t.b., too, all house guests, if she could have, and somewhere between all these hustlers, made herself a little life. But she had the children, she had a stepdaughter, she had no money, and she had to live with a man who fancied himself a public character and a moralist of a very saintly type. The moralist said mice brought germs and so she was obliged to chase the mouse and all its fellow guests. Nevertheless, although she despised animals, she felt involuntarily that the little marauder was much like herself, trying to get by: she belonged to the great race of human beings who regard life as a series of piracies of all powers.

She would play on and on till her cheeks got hot and then call for another cup of tea, or else go and get herself some store cheese and Worcestershire sauce in a plate, pushing the cards aside.

“I wish your mother would stop playing patience, it makes her look like an old witch or an old vixen possum,” Sam would say in a gently benevolent voice, in some offstage colloquy, if he ever came home and found her still at it. It did exhaust her in the end. She played feverishly, until her mind was a darkness, until all the memories and the ease had long since drained away. And then when the father came home, the children who had been battling and shuttling around her would all rush off like water down the sink, leaving her sitting there, with blackened eyes, a yellow skin, and straining wrinkles: and she would think of the sink, and mutter, as she did at this moment,

“A dirty cracked plate: that’s just what I am!”

“What did you say, Mummy?” asked little Sam. She looked at him, the image of his father, and repeated, “I’m a greasy old soup plate,” making them all laugh, laughing herself.

“Mother, you’re so silly,” Evie said.

Henny got up and moved into her room. It was a large room taking up a quarter of the original ground-floor plan, with two windows facing the east, and one window on the front lawn but screened from R Street by the double hedges. Although the room was furnished with the walnut suite that she had brought from home, and the double bed which she now used alone, there was plenty of room for their play.

Henny sat down at the dressing table to take off her hat. They clustered round the silver-littered table, picked up her rings.

“What did you buy, Mother?” someone persisted.

“Mother, can I have a nickel?”

Henny said, fluffing out the half-gray curls round her face, “I asked my mother for fifty cents to see the elephant jump the fence. Shoo, get out! You wretched limpets never give me a minute to myself.”

“Mother, can I have a nickel, please?”

“Mother, what did you buy-uy?” chanted Henny’s baby, Tommy, a dark four-year-old boy with shining almond eyes and a skullcap of curls. Meanwhile he climbed on the dressing table and, after studying her reflection for a long time in the mirror, kissed it.

“Look, Moth, Tommy kissed you in the glass!” They laughed at him, while he, much flattered, blushed and leaned over to kiss her, giving her a hearty smack-smack while he watched himself in the mirror.

“Oh, you kissing bug! It’s unlucky for two to look in the same glass. Now get down and get out! Go and feed the darn animals and then come and wash your hands for dinner.”

The flood receded, leaving Henny high and dry again. She sighed and got out the letter she had received that afternoon, reading it carefully.

At the end she folded it again, said with a sneer, “And a greasy finger mark from his greasy hypocritical mauler right in the middle: the sight of his long pious cheeks like suet and her fat red face across the table from each other—”

She looked at the letter thoughtfully for a while, turning it over, got out her fountain pen, and started a reply. But she tore her sheet of paper across, spat on the soiled letter, and, picking it up with a pair of curling tongs, burned it and her few scratchings in a little saucepan which had boiled dry on the radiator.

The letter was from her eldest brother, Norman Collyer. It refused to lend her money and said, somewhere near the offensive finger mark,

You should be able to manage. Your husband is making about $8,000 yearly and you always got lucky dips anyhow, being Father’s pet. I can only give you some good advice, which doubtless you will not follow, knowing you as I do. That is, draw in your horns, retrench somehow, don’t go running up accounts and don’t borrow from moneylenders. I’ve seen my own family half starving. What do you think I can make out of the job Father gives me?

You must get out of your own messes. The trouble is you never had to pay for your mistakes before.

Henny opened her windows to let the smoke out, and then began taking trinkets out of her silver jewel case and looking at them discontentedly. She threw open the double doors of her linen closet and rummaged amongst the sheets, pulling out first a library book and then two heavy silver soup ladles and six old silver teaspoons. She looked at them indifferently for a moment and then stuck them back in their hiding place.

She let Louie give the children their dinner, and ate hers on a tray in her bedroom, distractedly figuring on a bit of envelope. When she brought her tray out to the kitchen, Louie was slopping dishes about in the sink. Henny cried,

“Take your fat belly out of the sink! Look at your dress! Oh, my God! Now I’ve got to get you another one clean and dry for Monday. You’ll marry a drunkard when you grow up, always wet in front. Ernie, help Louie with the washing-up, and you others make yourselves scarce. And turn off the darn radio. It’s enough when Mr. Big-Me is at home blowing off steam.”

They ran out cheerfully while Louie drooped her underlip and tied a towel round her waist. Henny sighed, picked up the cup of tea that Louie had just poured out for her, and went into her bedroom, next door to the kitchen. She called from there,

“Ernie, bring me your pants and I’ll mend them.”

“There’s time,” he shouted considerately, “you don’t need to tonight. Tomorrow’s Sunday-Funday, and we’re painting the house—I’ll wear my overalls.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“O.K.” He shed his trousers at once and rushed in to her holding them out at arm’s length. He stood beside her for a moment, watching her pinch the cloth together. “I bet I could do that easy, Mum: why don’t you teach me?”

“Thank you, my son; but Mother will do it while she has the strength.”

“Are you sick today, Mother?”

“Mother’s always sick and tired,” she said gloomily.

“Will I bring you my shawl, Mother?” This was his baby shawl that he always took to bed with him when he felt sick or weepy.

“No, Son.” She looked at him straight, as if at a stranger, and then drew him to her, kissing him on the mouth.

“You’re Mother’s blessing; go and help Louie.” He cavorted and dashed out, hooting. She heard him in half a minute, chattering away affectionately to his half sister.

“But I should have been better off if I’d never laid eyes on any of them,” Henny grumbled to herself, as she put on her glasses and peered at the dark serge.

Stars drifted in chinks of the sky as Sam came home: the lamps were clouded in leaves in this little island of streets between river and parks. Georgetown’s glut of children, issue of streets of separate little houses, went shouting, colliding downhill, while Sam came up whistling, seeing the pale faces, flying knees, lights and stars above, around him. Sam could have been home just after sunset when his harum-scarum brood were still looking for him, and he had meant to be there, for he never broke his word to them. He could have taken Shank’s ponies, which, he was fond of saying, “take me everywhere, far afield and into the world of marvels which lies around us, into the highways and byways, into the homes of rich and poor alike, seeking the doorstep of him who loves his fellow man—and fellow woman, of course—seeking every rostrum where the servants of evil may be flagellated, and the root of all evil exposed.”