The Man Who Loved Children (73 page)

“My womb is tearing,” said Henny, holding her body, “with the weight of the great lolloping sheets. I am in such agonies that I don’t know how to bear it. How can this go on another week? He takes no notice; I know my insides are torn to pieces—” She stopped and examined Louie, “What are you staring at me like that for? What is the matter with me? Don’t stare at me!” Louie had lost all power of speech. Henny now recollected something, “What did you do? I saw you doing something!” Louie opened her mouth but only like a fish taking in air: she was struck dumb. She pointed to her mouth, the cup, shook her head. At this moment, Sam came into the kitchen, bringing with him the little carved wooden chest in which were the six tiny cups made from carved wood and lined with soft silver.

“Daforno,” said Sam, gently ignoring Henny, “daforno, we is going to hev our tea in poor Lai Wan Hoe’s beautiful little gift to his god-master—no, he had too much brains to think I was a god.” He planted the little chest tenderly on the pine table and, pointing to the big cups, said “Frow dat out, Looloo, we goin to hev Chinese tea daforno: it’s so hot I reckon we ought always to have it, anyhow.”

Louie looked from one to the other, waiting for what she could not imagine to open before her; but she was unable to speak a word: she just shook her head to them, to herself. Henny, with blazing black eyes, was looking wildly at the child; she raised her hand and pointed at her but said nothing. Then she said slowly, “You beast, you pair of beasts, my womb is torn to pieces with you—the oil is everywhere and your dirty sheets falling on to me to suffocate me with the sweat, I can’t stand it any more—she’s not to blame, she’s got guts, she was going to do it-she’s not to blame, if she were to go stark staring mad—your daughter is out of her mind—” Sam looked at Henny with hatred. “All right,” said Henny, “damn you all!”

She snatched the cup and drank it off quickly, a look of horror filling her as if she would have stopped herself but could not arrest the motion. She made a few steps with the cup, while Sam said, very puzzled, “What is this? What is going on?” Louie tried to explain but could only shake her head: even in her mind she could not think of any words. At the outer door of the kitchen leading to the glassed-in porch, Henny stopped, turned round, and then fell straight towards them, to her full length along the new cement floor.

This time Sam was shocked, for Henny had fallen face forwards and met the pavement with a heavy crack. The cup smashed. Louie still stood staring, with rather an amiable expression (for she was trying to say something), at her father, mother, and Evie. Evie had already run for the cushions and was trying to stick them under her mother’s head; and, for once, Sam helped her. He said anxiously, “I think Mothering is rather badly hurt, we must get her to bed.”

Louie came forward, and Sam, taking her quietness for disobedience, frowned at her but said nothing. He called Ernie but couldn’t get any of the boys. They staggered with her to the boys’ room and laid her on Ernie’s bed. Sam kept whistling for the boys, and now they heard the cries coming running, “Yippo! Yippills! Yes, Pad!”

Henny’s forehead and nose were bruised and cut. “Get some water and peroxide,” said Sam irritably, “you ought to know what to do.”

Louie gave a deep sigh and said slowly, with a clogged tongue, “Whatever is this?” She tried to pull the bundle of Ernie’s clothes off the bottom of the bedstead. He had stuffed two dirty pillowcases inside his pajamas; two corners of one protruded from the top like ears. The funny little shawl that Louie had knitted for Tommy, yellow wool with a face in red wool, and that Tommy took to bed for a comforter, had been fixed over this end of the pillow slips to make a face. A piece of string round “the neck” attached this manikin to the bed. She pulled at the knot.

“Get the water and a sponge,” said Sam irritably.

Louie left the manikin and started to the door, but there she stopped and said, “I think she’s dead.”

“Don’t be a goat.”

“I think she’s dead, Dad.”

“ ‘Dead, Dad, Dead Dad,’ ” he said: “go and do what you’re told.”

Louie turned round, saying in a deep rebellious tone, “What’s the use? You’d better call a doctor, or you’ll be in trouble.”

Sam was astonished at this, and, pulling Henny’s sleeve, said gently, “Henny? Henny? Pet?” He said to Evie, who looked worried, “I think Mothering’s got concussion.”

Louie returned with the little basin of water, which she put down beside the bed on a chair littered with boys’ clothes. The children, who had stayed outside, to hear from her about their mother’s accident, now came peeping, tiptoeing round the door, like birds creeping back to spy on a motionless man in a clearing. Tommy laughed suddenly, a laugh clear as summer river babble, “Look, there’s Ermy!” Ernie frowned. Tommy giggled, “Ermy hanged himself: he jacked himself up.” He pointed to the thing hanging on the bottom of the bed. “Look, he-he, he took my shawl for his face.” Sam’s face browned with its flush, “What are you talking about, you dope?” Tommy suppressed his laugh, “That’s Ermy. He said he hanged himself!” Sam’s eyes wandered back anxiously to Henny. Louie was bending over her listening; she got up, with unmoving face, “You see, you listen! Her heart isn’t beating.” Sam started with an expression of terror, and bent over. He jumped back, “First aid, kids, clear out! Get the doctor, Louie.” Louie half smiled, “I told you she was dead.”

Ernie rushed past the knot of children and threw himself on his mother, pulling at the bosom of her dressing gown, disarranging it wildly, screaming, “Mother, Mother, you aren’t dead? Is she dead? Is she dead? She isn’t dead!” He began to moan, saying, “Mother” and a moan. The children stood stricken in the doorway. Sam, after a queer movement of his chin, looking round as it were for help on all sides, strode through and over the huddled children and rushed to the telephone. Louie patiently came up and began sponging the forehead. “Let me do it,” said Ernie excitedly, and he began pasting away at the forehead, thinking that was a way to cure her. The children began to break down, each in his own way, and Chappy, sitting on the porch, who had just been bitten by an ant, began to yell for assistance. They heard Sam talking into the telephone, and then his quick tread. He began to question them, “What was Mother doing?” And the scene he had witnessed came to his mind: “What were you and Mother quarreling about?”

“Nothing,” said Louie, “only the dirty clothes; then Mother said she would take poison, and she drank a cup of tea full of cyanide.”

Sam thundered, “What?”

“She had it in a little pillbox,” faltered Louie; “she threw it in the garbage can!”

Sam rushed to the photographic chamber. They heard him running out verifying, saying aloud, “This is terrible! Oh, God, what a terrible thing! I never thought she meant it. God above, Louie, Louie!”

Tommy came out with great round black eyes, Henny’s eyes, and, tiptoeing up to his raging father, whispered, “Pad, will we go to school today?”

At this moment, the front-door bell rang. Louie, thinking it was the doctor, ran to open the door and saw standing there a middle-aged woman, with streaky black hair, a puffy, good-natured face, and brown eyes, in a go-to-meeting straw hat and a speckled silk dress. She looked at her for a minute without recognition and then saw it was Tommy’s teacher, Miss Wilson. Miss Wilson seemed embarrassed but said stiffly, “Is your mother in?”

“No,” said Louie, “that is—she’s sick.”

“I’m sorry,” said the woman stiffly, “I tried to get her yesterday on the phone and Saturday too, but either she wasn’t in all the week end, or she wouldn’t answer me. It’s very important.”

“What is it? What is it?” cried Sam testily, “What is it? You must go away. There has been a dreadful accident.”

“I’m Miss Wilson, Tommy’s teacher,” said the woman. “I’m at the school; I wanted to see Mrs. Pollit about the money.”

Sam looked confused, and the woman had to keep on explaining to him how important it was, that it was urgent about the money.

“Money, what money?” Sam asked confusedly again.

“It’s the money: the piano’s no good to me,” said the woman, anxiously. “What can I do with a grand piano? I let her give me that security. I’m sorry if she’s sick. I really am. I know she’s a good woman. I like Mrs. Pollit. I respect her. But it’s just now, I’ve got to pay some things, my taxes were so high—”

Sam said, “Mrs. Wilson, will you come back? Mrs. Pollit has had a bad accident. I don’t know if she will live,” and he sobbed.

“Oh,” cried the woman, “Oh! Oh, no! Oh, I didn’t mean—oh, about the money. I’ll manage somehow—but when can I come to see you? I wouldn’t trouble her for the world, only—” Suddenly she began to cry too and asked for a glass of water, so that they had to take her into the common room while the children began to gather slowly round her; and, between crying and drinking her water, and wiping her eyes, she gabbled some story about lending Henny one hundred dollars at six per cent, against the grand piano, though she knew you could hardly sell such things nowadays when the rage was for little pianos: but that as Henny was the sister-in-law of Miss Josephine Pollit, such a splendid woman, and Mr. Pollit too, everyone knew him, but now she found out that Mrs. Pollit had borrowed too from the teacher of the twins and from Ernie’s teacher, and she had been to the high school and taken fifteen dollars for clothing from Louie’s teacher, and now she heard that Mr. Lomasne, that horrible man, a dreadful usurer who lent fifty dollars and then you owed him money for the rest of your life, and she didn’t know what else, and she was afraid she would never see her money again. She was a poor woman. She didn’t grudge Mrs. Pollit the money—she was a good woman, a wife and mother, but she had to have it: she had a mother to keep herself and an old father-she sobbed and sobbed till she became inarticulate.

At this moment, the doctor arrived. Miss Wilson waited passionately to hear what was the matter with Mrs. Pollit and when she heard that she was dead, she let out a dreadful cry and threw her arms round Tommy, calling him her “poor dear little darling, how dreadful for the baby!” At last she went, but at the door she stopped and asked Louie, very low and ashamed, if she thought she would get her money. “I’m so ashamed, dear, but I’m a poor woman myself, and I’m getting on,” she said. Then she nodded and walked away with a tottering gait, till she got to the avenue and was lost to view.

Louie turned back to give the children some breakfast.

It was three weeks since what remained of Henrietta Pollit, after the disgrace of a coroner’s inquest, had gone into the earth; that earth was the Collyer plot in Greenmount Cemetery. A strange company of jackals, smelling each other, had slunk, or strutted before the coroner—Jim Lomasne and a busy, neat little downtown usurer, the manager of an auto loan company, and good-looking, respectable little Archie Lessinum, and even Henny’s sisters, Auntie Jo, Louie, Sam, Miss Wilson, and Miss Aiden, and it had come out that the meek, sweet-smiling, unassertive Henrietta had been a bundle of sordid secrets, from life’s end to life’s end, had not only stripped herself naked to pay the household bills and the usurious interests which had mounted and mounted from the time she had had Ernie, but had begged and cadged from every member of her family, from domestic suppliers, the children’s teachers, and all sorts of strangers, to all telling her story of the children’s needs.

Where had it all gone? people asked: but Archie Lessinum found that no mystery—where had the Collyer estate gone? he asked. With twelve children to rear and of those, some to marry and many incapacitated sons (incapacitated by temperament) to keep, and their families after them, the good-natured, self-made merchant David Collyer had had no difficulty in dissipating a great estate. What was left was held in spendthrift trust for his sons and daughters, all but Hassie (a trustee) financial ne’er-do-weels. The estate needed repairs, had second mortgages to pay off; old Ellen Collyer had to be kept; and only after her death, and at the time when the estate became self-supporting again, would it begin to pay out dividends to the many sons and daughters or their heirs. Now, each of them had numerous heirs, Henny being no different from any other Collyer in this, Hassie and Eleanor alone being exceptions. The money due to Ernie and the other children of Henrietta, when the dividends began to come in, would be very little: but as they were young minors, this money, for the time being, would be applied to paying off Henny’s large debts. But Henny had begun owing money from the time she was married. She had contracted debts before many times, but these had always been paid by her indulgent father. These debts had been kept secret from her husband, whose puritan wrath she feared, though not from her money-wise family; and, lacking his firm hand, she had run on and on, until at the last she had come into the hands of despicable, predatory usurers like James Lomasne, who lent without papers and collected through blackmail.

All one could say of Lomasne was that he had a peculiar reputation for an honest man: Lomasne, on the other hand, said, with great assurance and an appearance of charitable respectability, that he had lent money indeed to his neighbor Mrs. Pollit, but only because he liked the children and he knew she was in need—and he ventured to make some remarks upon the character of Samuel C. Pollit which revolted everyone. His honesty was shown by his having signed no papers with Mrs. Pollit and having never demanded any interest. She paid him back when she could—but so little had she paid him back that there was still owing to him a sum of five hundred fifty dollars. He had lent this money, too, he said, because Mr. Pollit had told him he would go into his boat-and-coffin business: and he regarded this money lent to Mrs. Pollit more in the light of an investment, and then, they were friends and neighbors, and Mr. Pollit took an exceeding interest in his little girl, “Fairy,” as in all other little girls of the neighborhood.

True, the world was all ears and eyes for Sam’s misfortune, but Sam bore it with noble dignity, for now at least people knew what he had borne all these years. But as to where the money had gone, he was as innocent as a babe, he told the creditors later on: it was like lightning opening the ground at his feet, and now, to a certain extent, he could understand some of the rages of the unfortunate, guilty, but miserable woman. She had been harassed by the bloodhounds of debt; their tongues had been belling in her brain, their maws opening at her shins, their hell-breath mixing with her breath all these years. Yes, if she had only confided in him, he would have been able to deny publicly his responsibility and so take possibility of credit away from her, or he would have been able to rein her in, save her from this criminal recklessness. For she knew, he said sadly, to Jo, alas! she knew only too well what money waste was: it was in the blood. She knew better than he, but she was a foolish, weak, silly woman with a taste for extravagance and no means of gratifying it. Where did the money go? They must not ask him. His salary would have been ample for a sensible woman, and he should have known better than to marry a rich girl with no idea of a planned economy.