Mary would run away from the table in tears and throw herself on her bed with a book and lie there listening to their voices raised and then Daddy’s heavy slow step and the slam of the door and the sound of him cranking the car to start off on his calls again. Often she lay there with her teeth clenched wishing if Mother would only die and leave her and Daddy living alone quietly together. A cold shudder would go through her at the thought of how awful it was to have thoughts like that, and she’d start reading, hardly able to see the printed page through her tears at first but gradually forgetting herself in the story in the book.
One thing that Mother and Daddy agreed about was that they wanted Mary to go to a really good eastern college. The year before she graduated from highschool Mary had passed all the College Board exams except solid geometry. She was crazy to go.
Except for a few days camping every summer with Daddy and one summer month she spent answering the phone and making out the cards of the patients and keeping his accounts and sending out his bills at his office, she hated it in Colorado Springs. Her only boyfriend was a young fellow with a clubfoot named Joe Denny, the son of a saloonkeeper in Colorado City. He was working his way through Colorado College. He was a bitter slowspoken towheaded boy with a sharp jaw, a wizard in math. He hated liquor and John D. Rockefeller more than anything in the world. She and Joe and Ada would go out on picnics Sunday to the Garden of the Gods or Austin Bluffs or one of the canyons and read poetry together. Their favorites were The Hound of Heaven and The City of Dreadful Night. Joe thrilled the girls one day standing on a flat rock above the little fire they were frying their bacon over and reciting The Man with the Hoe. At first they thought he’d written it himself.
When they got in, feeling sunburned and happy after a day in the open, Mary would so wish she could take her friends home the way Ada did. The Cohns were kind and jolly and always asked everybody to stay to dinner in spite of the fact that poor Mr. Cohn was a very sick man. But Mary didn’t dare take anybody home to her house for fear Mother would be rude to them, or that there’d be one of those yelling matches that started up all the time between Mother and Daddy. The summer before she went to Vassar Mother and Daddy weren’t speaking at all after a terrible argument when Daddy said one day at supper that he was going to vote for Eugene V. Debs in November.
At Vassar the girls she knew were better dressed than she was and had uppity finishingschool manners, but for the first time in her life she was popular. The instructors liked her because she was neat and serious and downright about everything and the girls said she was as homely as a mud fence but a darling.
It was all spoiled the second year when Ada came to Vassar. Ada was her oldest friend and Mary loved her dearly, so she was horrified to catch herself wishing Ada hadn’t come. Ada had gotten so lush and Jewish and noisy, and her clothes were too expensive and never just right. They roomed together and Ada bought most of Mary’s clothes and books for her because her allowance was so tiny. After Ada came Mary wasn’t popular the way she’d been, and the most successful girls shied off from her. Mary and Ada majored in sociology and said they were going to be socialworkers.
When Mary was a junior Mother went to Reno and got a divorce from Daddy, giving intemperance and mental cruelty as the cause. It had never occurred to Mary that poor Daddy drank. She cried and cried when she read about it in a newspaper clipping marked in red pencil some nameless wellwisher sent her from Colorado Springs. She burned the clipping in the fireplace so that Ada shouldn’t see it, and when Ada asked her why her eyes were so red said it was because it had made her cry to read about all those poor soldiers being killed in the war in Europe. It made her feel awful having told Ada a lie and she lay awake all night worrying about it.
The next summer the two of them got jobs doing settlementwork at Hull House in Chicago. Chicago was scary and poor Ada Cohn couldn’t keep on with the work and went up to Michigan to have a nervous breakdown; it was so awful the way poor people lived and the cracked red knuckles of the women who took in washing and the scabby heads of the little children and the clatter and the gritty wind on South Halstead Street and the stench of the stockyards; but it made Mary feel like years back in Trinidad when she was a little girl, the way she’d felt the summer she worked in Daddy’s office.
When she went back to Colorado Springs for two weeks before Vassar opened she found Mother staying in style in a small suite at the Broadmoor. Mother had inherited a block of stocks in American Smelting and Refining when Uncle Henry was killed in a streetcar accident in Denver, and had an income of twenty thousand a year. She had become a great bridgeplayer and was going round the country speaking at women’s clubs against votes for women. She spoke of Daddy in a sweet cold acid voice as “your poor dear father,” and told Mary she must dress better and stop wearing those awful spectacles. Mary wouldn’t take any money from her mother because she said nobody had a right to money they hadn’t earned, but she did let her fit her out with a new tailored tweed suit and a plain afternoondress with a lace collar and cuffs. She got along better with her mother now, but there was always a cold feeling of strain between them.
Mother said she didn’t know where Daddy was living, so Mary had to go down to the office to see him. The office was dingier than she remembered it, and full of patients, downandoutlooking people mostly, and it was an hour before he could get away to take her to lunch.
They ate perched on stools at the counter of the little lunchroom next door. Daddy’s hair was almost white now and his face was terribly lined and there were big grey pouches under his eyes. Mary got a lump in her throat every time she looked at him. “Oh, Daddy, you ought to take a rest.” “I know . . . I ought to get out of the altitude for a while. The old pump isn’t so good as it was.” “Daddy, why don’t you come east at Christmas?” “Maybe I will if I can raise the kale and get somebody to take over my practice for a month.” She loved the deep bass of his voice so. “It would do you so much good. . . . It’s so long since we had a trip together.”
It was late. There was nobody in the lunchroom except the frozenmouthed waitress who was eating her own lunch at a table in the back. The big tiredfaced clock over the coffeeurn was ticking loud in the pauses of Daddy’s slow talk.
“I never expected to neglect my own little girl . . . you know how it is . . . that’s what I’ve done. . . . How’s your mother?” “Oh, Mother’s on top of the world,” she said with a laugh that sounded tinny in her ears. She was working to put Daddy at his ease, like a charity case. “Oh, well, that’s all over now. . . . I was never the proper husband for her,” said Daddy.
Mary felt her eyes fill with tears. “Daddy, after I’ve graduated will you let me take over your office? That awful Miss Hylan is so slipshod. . . .” “Oh, you’ll have better things to do. It’s always a surprise to me how many people pay their bills anyway . . . I don’t pay mine.” “Daddy, I’m going to have to take you in hand.” “I reckon you will, daughter . . . your settlement work is just trainin’ for the reform of the old man, eh?” She felt herself blushing.
She’d hardly settled down to being with him when he had to rush off to see a woman who had been in labor five days and hadn’t had her baby yet. She hated going back to the Broadmoor and the bellhops in monkeyjackets and the overdressed old hens sitting in the lobby. That evening Joe Denny called up to see if he could take her out for a drive. Mother was busy at bridge so she slipped out without saying anything to her and met him on the hotel porch. She had on her new dress and had taken off her glasses and put them in her little bag. Joe was all a blur to her but she could make out that he looked well and prosperous and was driving a new little Ford roadster.
“Why, Mary French,” he said, “why, if you haven’t gone and got goodlooking on me. . . . I guess there’s no chance now for a guy like me.”
They drove slowly round the park for a while and then he parked the car in a spot of moonlight over a culvert. Down the little gully beyond the quakingaspens you could see the pl
ains dark and shimmery stretching way off to the moonlit horizon. “How lovely,” she said. He turned his serious face with its pointed chin to hers and said stammering a little, “Mary, I’ve got to spit it out. . . . I want you and me to be engaged. . . . I’m going to Cornell to take an engineering course . . . scholarship. . . . When I get out I ought to be able to make fair money inside of a couple of years and be able to support a wife. . . . It would make me awful happy . . . if you’d say maybe . . . if by that time . . . there wasn’t anybody else. . . .” His voice dwindled away.
Mary had a glimpse of the sharp serious lines of his face in the moonlight. She couldn’t look at him.
“Joe, I always felt we were friends like Ada and me. It spoils everything to talk like that. . . . When I get out of college I want to do socialservice work and I’ve got to take care of Daddy. . . . Please don’t . . . anything like that makes me feel awful.”
He held his square hand out and they shook hands solemnly over the dashboard. “All right, sister, what you say goes,” he said and drove her back to the hotel without another word. She sat a long time on the porch looking out at the September moonlight feeling awful.
A few days later when she left to go back to school it was Joe who drove her to the station to take the train east because Mother had an important committeemeeting and Daddy had to be at the hospital. When they said goodby and shook hands he tapped her nervously on the shoulder a couple of times and acted like his throat was dry, but he didn’t say anything more about getting engaged. Mary was so relieved.
On the train she read Ernest Poole’s The Harbor and reread The Jungle and lay in the pullmanberth that night too excited to sleep, listening to the rumble of the wheels over the rails, the clatter of crossings, the faraway spooky wails of the locomotive, remembering the overdressed women putting on airs in the ladies’ dressingroom who’d elbowed her away from the mirror and the heavyfaced businessmen snoring in their berths, thinking of the work there was to be done to make the country what it ought to be, the social conditions, the slums, the shanties with filthy tottering backhouses, the miners’ children in grimy coats too big for them, the overworked women stooping over stoves, the youngsters struggling for an education in nightschools, hunger and unemployment and drink, and the police and the lawyers and the judges always ready to take it out on the weak; if the people in the pullmancars could only be made to understand how it was; if she sacrificed her life, like Daddy taking care of his patients night and day, maybe she, like Miss Addams . . .
She couldn’t wait to begin. She couldn’t stay in her berth. She got up and went and sat tingling in the empty dressingroom trying to read The Promise of American Life. She read a few pages but she couldn’t take in the meaning of the words; thoughts were racing across her mind like the tatters of cloud pouring through the pass and across the dark bulk of the mountains at home. She got cold and shivery and went back to her berth.
Crossing Chicago she suddenly told the taximan to drive her to Hull House. She had to tell Miss Addams how she felt. But when the taxi drew up to the curb in the midst of the familiar squalor of South Halstead Street and she saw two girls she knew standing under the stone porch talking, she suddenly lost her nerve and told the driver to go on to the station.
Back at Vassar that winter everything seemed awful. Ada had taken up music and was studying the violin and could think of nothing but getting down to New York for concerts. She said she was in love with Dr. Muck of the Boston Symphony and wouldn’t talk about the war or pacifism or social work or anything like that. The world outside—the submarine campaign, the war, the election—was so vivid Mary couldn’t keep her mind on her courses or on Ada’s gabble about musical celebrities. She went to all the lectures about current events and social conditions.
The lecture that excited her most that winter was G. H. Barrow’s lecture on “The Promise of Peace.” He was a tall thin man with bushy grey hair and a red face and a prominent adamsapple and luminous eyes that tended to start out of his head a little. He had a little stutter and a warm confidential manner when he talked. He seemed so nice somehow Mary felt sure he had been a workingman. He had red gnarled hands with long fingers and walked up and down the room with a sinewy stride taking off and putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. After the lecture he was at Mr. Hardwick’s house and Mrs. Hardwick served lemonade and cocoa and sandwiches and the girls all gathered round and asked questions. He was shyer than on the platform but he talked beautifully about Labor’s faith in Mr. Wilson and how Labor would demand peace and how the Mexican revolution (he’d just been to Mexico and had had all sorts of adventures there) was just a beginning. Labor was going to get on its feet all over the world and start cleaning up the mess the old order had made, not by violence but by peaceful methods, Wilsonian methods. That night when Mary got to bed she could still feel the taut appealing nervous tremble that came into Mr. Barrow’s voice sometimes. It made her crazy anxious to get out of this choky collegelife and out into the world. She’d never known time to drag so as it did that winter.
One slushy day of February thaw she’d gone back to the room to change her wet overshoes between classes when she found a yellow telegram under the door: BETTER COME HOME FOR A WHILE YOUR MOTHER NOT VERY WELL. It was signed DADDY. She was terribly worried but it was a relief to have an excuse to get away from college. She took a lot of books with her but she couldn’t read on the train. She sat there too hot in the greenplush pullman with a book on her knees, staring out at the flat snowcovered fields edged with tangles of bare violet trees and the billboards and the shanties and redbrick falsefront stores along new concrete highways and towns of ramshackle frame houses sooty with factorysmoke and the shanties and the barns and the outhouses slowly turning as the train bored through the midwest, and thought of nothing.
Daddy met her at the station. His clothes looked even more rumpled than usual and he had a button off his overcoat. His face was full of new small fine wrinkles when he smiled. His eyes were redrimmed as if he hadn’t slept for nights.
“It’s all right, Mary,” he said. “I oughtn’t to have wired you to come . . . just selfindulgence . . . gettin’ lonely in my old age.” He grabbed her bag from the porter and went on talking as they walked out of the station. “Your mother’s goin’ along fine . . . I pulled her through. . . . Lucky I got wind that she was sick. That damn housephysician at the hotel would have killed her in another day. This Spanish influenza is tricky stuff.”
“Is it bad here, Daddy?”
“Very. . . . I want you to be very careful to avoid infection. . . . Hop in, I’ll drive you out there.” He cranked the rusty touringcar and motioned her into the front seat. “You know how your poor mother feels about liquor? . . . Well, I kept her drunk for four days.”
He got in beside her and started, talking as he drove. The iron cold made her feel better after the dusty choking plush-smell of the sleeper. “She was nicer than I’ve ever known her. By God, I almost fell in love with her all over again. . . . You must be very careful not to let her do too much when she gets up . . . you know how she is. . . . It’s the relapses that kill in this business.”
Mary felt suddenly happy. The bare twigs of the trees rosy and yellow and purple spread against the blue over the broad quiet streets. There were patches of frozen snow on the lawns. The sky was tremendously tall and full of yellow sunlight. The cold made the little hairs in her nose crisp.
Out at the Broadmoor Mother was lying in her bed in her neat sunny room with a pink bedjacket on over her nightgown and a lace boudoircap on her neatlycombed black hair. She looked pale but so young and pretty and sort of foolish that for a second Mary felt that she and Daddy were the grownup people and Mother was their daughter. Right away Mother started talking happily about the war and the Huns and the submarine campaign and what could Mr. Wilson be thinking of not teaching those Mexicans a lesson. She was sure it wouldn’t have been like that if Mr. Hughes had been elected; in fact she was sure that he had been ele
cted legally and that the Democrats had stolen the election by some skulduggery or other. And that dreadful Bryan was making the country a laughingstock. “My dear, Bryan is a traitor and ought to be shot.” Daddy grinned at Mary, shrugged his shoulders and went off saying, “Now, Hilda, just stay in bed, and please, no alcoholic excess.”
When Daddy had gone Mother suddenly started to cry. When Mary asked her what was the matter she wouldn’t say. “I guess it’s the influenza makes me weak in the head,” she said. “My dear, it’s only by the mercy of God that I was spared.”
Mary couldn’t sit all day listening to her mother go on about preparedness, it made her feel too miserable; so she went down to Daddy’s office next morning to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. The waitingroom was crowded. When she peeped into his consultingroom she could see at a glance that he hadn’t been to bed all night. It turned out that Miss Hylan had gone home sick the day before. Mary said she’d take her place but Daddy didn’t want to let her. “Nonsense,” said Mary, “I can say doctor’s office over the phone as well as that awful Miss Hylan can.” He finally gave her a gauze mask and let her stay.
When they’d finished up the last patient they went over to the lunchroom for something to eat. It was three o’clock. “You’d better go out and see your mother,” he said. “I’ve got to start on my rounds. They die awful easy from this thing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’ll go back and tidy up the desk first,” said Mary firmly.
“If anybody calls up tell them that if they think it’s the flu, the patient must be put right to bed, keep their feet warm with a hotwater bottle and plenty of stimulants. No use trying to go to the hospital because there’s not a bed in a radius of a hundred miles.”
Mary went back to the office and sat down at the desk. There seemed to be an awful lot of new patients; on the last day Miss Hylan had run out of indexcards and had written their names on a scratchpad. They were all flu cases. While she sat there the phone rang constantly. Mary’s fingers were cold and she felt trembly all over when she heard the anxious voices, men’s, women’s, asking for Doc French. It was five before she got away from the office. She took the streetcar out to the Broadmoor.
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