Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  At the train she remembered to ask him about it. “You know I’m awfully in love with you, Henry. I’ve meant everything I’ve said. . . . You won’t ever let anything or anyone come between us?”

  “I’d like to see them try!”

  His kisses left her surer of his love than his grammar.

  CHAPTER V

  HOME was strange but everything was delightful. It was even nice to be driving out dingy Market Street from the West Philadelphia station, recalling the torn-up streets with which the city seems eternally cursed.

  “Look, dad, that same heap of dirt and cobble-stones was on that identical corner when I left last September.”

  She had arrived home in the middle of the afternoon. By dinner she had restored to dining- and living-rooms some semblance of their usual orderliness and attractiveness. The boys, and her father too, commented on the table with its flowers and fine linen, and the grand meal which she had prepared with the very real aid of Oliver.

  “Thank you, gentlemen, and tomorrow I’ll start on your rooms. So look out for papers and secrets! . . . But what became of Sally, Dad? Didn’t go to Carpathia this summer, did she?”

  “No,” her father retorted, “but your mother went to Switzerland. And you had to have some change and your carfare back from Chicago. And this rascal,” he patted Christopher’s arm affectionately, “got himself expelled last term and had to go to summer school for make-up work. So your old dad, in order to save somewhere, let Sally off for the summer and decided to keep house himself with the help of Oliver.” He sighed a little wearily. “But it’s been mostly Oliver, I guess.”

  Teresa pushed her chair back slightly and beckoned to the lad.

  “Come here, Sugar.”

  Oliver rose, tall and fine and beautiful. It seemed to his sister that he was really dazzling, so completely did happiness and satisfaction transfigure his sensitive face. For all his height and his splendid physical poise he gave an effect of childishness both pleasing and pathetic. It was pleasant to discover a young modern minus the pertness and forwardness so often apparent in the American child of twelve. On the other hand you realized at once his fearful sensitiveness to pain. He might eventually even learn to endure it. But his intense stoicism would always be accompanied by keen suffering.

  He looked down now at Teresa, his eyes bright with their apprehension of happiness. “I’m so glad you’re home, Tess. . . . It’s been so long since I’ve seen you. . . . You’re even nicer than I remember.” . . .

  He leant his shapely head, with its thick roughened mane, against her sleek one. He whispered: “I liked you to call me Sugar. . . . I never heard you say that before, though Grandma used to. . . .” He whispered even lower: “Will you come in my room and bid me good-night?”

  “Darling, of course I will.” How well she understood what lack, what longing, lay back of that request. She thought swiftly to herself. “But things will change for him. . . . I’ll change them,” she vowed proudly. “Mother tried her best to ruin things for me but see how perfect everything is turning out. . . . He’ll get a break, too!”

  After dinner they sat for a while on the little side porch and later in the living-room. Teresa told her father and Christopher, her head against Oliver perched so happily on the arm of her chair, about her precious summer . . . but said never a word about Henry. The two men, legs outstretched, cigarette in hand, thought in varying degree of consciousness: “This is what home should be like.” The elder Christopher found himself framing the wish that he had managed somehow to scrape together a little more money for Olivia . . . perhaps she might have stayed away indefinitely.

  His namesake thought he’d have “now some of the fellows around to the house for billiards and a snack. Have to do it before Mother returns. Bet Teresa could get together something awfully decent for us to eat.”

  Oliver, hanging to the very end on her words, radiant and reluctant, got up finally to go to bed. Teresa called after him. “I’m coming in later, Hon, to see you’re covered up.”

  The house was transfigured into a home.

  At midnight she did go into her little brother’s room. Wide awake as soon as he heard her enter he sat up in bed, his eyes feverishly bright in the soft night light.

  “Darling, you should have been asleep.”

  “I was so afraid I’d miss you, Tessa.” She sat on his bed and he snuggled closer. “You know Grandma Blake was just like you, Tess. She used to come in my room and tell me good-night. I liked it so . . . I’ve sort of missed it.”

  “Yes, I know. But of course you are growing up.” But oh, she thought, after all he is her baby! Couldn’t she give him a little extra mothering? Aloud she said: “You’ve been pretty happy lately, haven’t you, Ollie?”

  “Oh, yes,” he acquiesced quickly, eagerly. “It’s been awfully jolly being home. We’ve had a great summer. Chris has been swell; he lets me go swimming with him. And he’s helping me with tennis. And Dad takes me on his calls and when we get on back roads he lets me drive!”

  “Dad’s a prince. But before the summer . . . didn’t you have a nice time with Mother, too? Of course you know she’s awfully busy.”

  “Yes, she is . . . and I try not to bother her. You know,” an expression of wistfulness shadowed the mobile face, “I—I think she likes me better than she used to.”

  “Why, darling, she’s always liked you! All mothers love their children.”

  “Do they? But it always seemed to me that Mother was different somehow. Not like Granny is to David and Janet—isn’t it funny to have an uncle and aunt as young as they are? Granny fussed over me much more than Mother does. . . . She doesn’t think I’m a baby . . . just because I like someone to be nice to me. . . .”

  “I’m sure Mother doesn’t think that either, dear. If she said so she was probably joking.”

  He looked a little doubtful at this, then his face brightened. “Anyway I know how to please her now. We play a sort of game together and she’s always nice to me afterwards.”

  “A game?” Teresa’s face showed her surprise. . . .

  “Yes, you know she likes to entertain those ladies that belong on her committees; she has them here for tea, lots of times. And I play at being the butler and serve the tea for her. . . . I have never spilled a drop or broken anything yet.”

  Her voice was aghast. “You play at being the butler!”

  “Yes, I put on a white suit and slick my hair back . . . they think I’m Japanese or Mexican.”

  “And she tells them afterwards what a smart little son she has?”

  “Oh, no! She doesn’t tell them anything. You see most of the other ladies have butlers and foreign servants. And Mother felt so bad because Dad couldn’t afford to let her have one. . . . So she said if she just had somebody who could make believe for her. . . . She said of course I couldn’t . . . I was such a baby!”

  “So now she doesn’t think you’re such a baby any more?”

  “No, I don’t guess she does. . . . Chris doesn’t like me to do it though. The first time I did it he was home from boarding-school. And he came in and found me in my suit. . . . He was very angry. I never let him know about it any more. Why should he mind my helping Mother?”

  “I don’t know, dear.”

  Oliver leaned closer. “I’m sure he’d tell you, Tess. But that was the reason why he got himself expelled from that school. He said since both Mother and Dad were so busy he thought he’d better come home and look after me.”

  She slipped on her knees to the side of the bed, her heart shaking. “Little boy, can you keep a secret?”

  “You betcher!”

  “How’d you like to come and live with me and let me be your mother?”

  He considered this. One could almost see the thoughts racing behind that candid face. “I’d like it fine. Somehow I don’t think you’d be so busy with outside people,” he added with no intention. “And you’re young. You’d understand more about me, wouldn’t you? Grown-up mothers, I gu
ess, sort of forget.”

  “Well, listen. I’m going to be married. In two years. To the nicest boy. And we’re going to live far away in Chicago, where I’ve just come from, you know. And right away as soon as we get our house fixed, I’ll send for you; no, I’ll come for you myself. You’ll like that, Honey?”

  “Will I like it? Boy! . . . Will I like it! What will your husband do?”

  “He’s studying engineering; but he’s just as likely to end up being an aviator.”

  “I like that. Of course I’ll be a musician, but I might just as well,” said Oliver eclectically, “be a flier too.”

  She went to her room and gazed and gazed at a picture of Olivia on her dressing table. Presently she picked it up and laid it carefully, face downward, in a drawer. In her heart was a prayer: “God, God don’t let me hate her! I mustn’t hate my mother, God!”

  She was so grateful for Henry. She could imagine the indignation with which he would greet her tale. And yet he would inject into the whole sorry business a note of humor. . . . She remembered then that she had never acquainted him with her mother’s obsession nor with the knowledge of her own long-practiced deception. But of course that wouldn’t make any real difference. . . . Dear Henry!

  To her great relief her mother upon her arrival asked almost no questions about the summer. Olivia, indeed, was so taken up with her own experiences . . . her triumphs, as she envisaged them . . . that she would have had no ear for her daughter’s exploits even if the girl had been inclined to relate them.

  Mrs. Cary’s European experiences had been of the most ordinary and meager. She had, to start with, gone on a carefully planned tourist trip. Not a stop, not a sight varied from the usual. No spontaneous charming little side-trips based on individual predilection. Impossible to conceive of anything more horribly cut and dried than Olivia’s visit to the Peace Conference.

  The conference itself was a marvel since it was planned and developed by several of the world’s cleverest and most distinguished women. Women of brains, of poise, of undoubted equipment, of great sincerity. Their ideas were splendid, their plans of execution rational. Save for their tendency to disregard the human equation which itself has no notion of disregarding war—all their suggestions were even feasible. Add to this, some extraordinary oratory and the appearance of a score of the greatest publicists and thinkers of the age and one has some concept of the value and merit of the gathering.

  But none of these things meant anything to Olivia. She was indeed unconscious of having assisted at a great feministic gesture. . . . It is doubtful if she remembered the blue of Lake Geneva; the greenness of the confluent Rhine; the majesty, even when dimmed by distance, of benignant Mont Blanc; the charm of twisting streets, the allure of the little restaurant off the beaten path. All she recalled was the cup of tea shared with Mrs. Bivins of Xenia; the time she and the Simmons “girls” shopped; their remark when she had tried on the dark blue dress with the red buttons, “which set off your Italian coloring, my dear.”

  “You might have thought,” she told her unmoved husband, “that we had been all girls together.”

  She sighed happily and went off into a secret memory of the luncheon at the Hôtel des Families . . . when disapproving Diana Heflin, a native of Georgia, U.S.A., surveyed, through haughty glasses, two young colored Americans lunching serenely with two equally content white Americans. . . .

  “Wouldn’t you think?” said the Georgian, “that Nigras would come to know their place and keep it? I believe as much as anyone else that there should be a place in the sun for everybody; but there are places and places.”

  Olivia had risen from her table happily. No one, she reflected, could ever put her or any member of her family in his “place.” Then for a brief annoying second she had thought of Oliver. . . .

  She said nothing of these things to her family.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE long golden summer drew to its end. In spite of the happiness which it had brought her, Teresa was glad to see it go. The strain of living with her mother was almost intolerable. Not that Olivia was unkind or unpleasant. She had never been less unfriendly. But her mere presence, the knowledge of her desires and determination, plunged the young girl into a vortex of new deceptions, petty deceits which sometimes rendered her almost desperate.

  It was imperative that she keep her engagement to Henry a secret—for two years! The time which, even viewed with the eyes of young and impatient lovers, seemed a trifle, stretched off, as Olivia advanced upon the scene, into centuries. She must not, the young girl reasoned, render herself in anyway suspect.

  To this end she planned to listen with more sympathy and attention than she had ever shown to her mother’s schemes and plans for the new life opening at college. Teresa was to dress superlatively; she was, within limits, to entertain. Olivia had it in mind to ask Christopher, senior, to give her a little roadster. Nothing like an occasional automobile ride to make people chummy. . . .

  “Besides, it’ll bring you invitations to the homes of girls in the vicinity. . . .

  “Very good people live up that way.”

  “But, Mother,” the girl had said aghast, in spite of her resolutions: “Father can’t afford all that. My room and board, and Chris in college, too! And Oliver to be got ready!”

  “Got ready for what?”

  “Well, he’s to go off too to some good school sooner or later, isn’t he?”

  Olivia favored her daughter with a cool stare. “Why should he? You know as well as I, Olivia, that Oliver hasn’t your and Christopher’s chances. . . . Why would your father need to waste money on him? These Philadelphia schools are quite good enough. Goodness! That was all you and Chris ever said when we began to talk of sending you two off to school.”

  Ignoring her daughter’s disconcerted silence, she resumed. “I don’t need to remind you, Teresa, that Amherst is just a few miles away. You’ll meet plenty of young men. Now, Teresa, show some sense and spirit and do make the most of this opportunity. You’ll live to thank me for it yet. . . . There’re many colored girls, as white as you, who would give their eye teeth to have everything made as smooth for them as I am making it for you.”

  “Phebe Grant wouldn’t,” Teresa observed evenly.

  “Phebe Grant wouldn’t!” For once her mother’s equanimity slipped its leash and she showed plainly the exasperation which her children’s hard-headed stupidity awakened in her.

  “Phebe Grant has long since come to her senses. Phebe Grant is working with a first class modiste on Walnut Street. She told me herself she was passing. And anyway I’ve met her twice, no, three times, strolling out Spruce Street with a young white fellow. The last time I saw her, I simply forced her to introduce him. Nash his name is. Looked as though he might be one of the Chestnut Hill Nashes. You see them in the Society Column.”

  Teresa knew nothing and cared far less about the activities of the Chestnut Hill Nashes. “But I can tell you what,” she said to Christopher, “no one could ever make me believe that Phebe is passing—except for business reasons. Though in her case she must have a hard time passing for colored, don’t you think so, Chris?”

  Christopher was indifferent. He didn’t know. “Don’t think I remember her very well,” he said cheerfully. “Sort of washed-out looking little gal with stringy hair?”

  “Oh, Chris! And you know Phebe’s hair is beautiful.”

  “Don’t remember a thing about it,” he said placidly. His manner changed. “All I know is I’m sick and tired of this color business. Mother sure had better lay off me . . . or I’m going to bring her home the blackest daughter-in-law!”

  “Wouldn’t that be something!” His sister laughed. “But she does rile you. . . . Too bad you never cared for Marise. . . . I know mother doesn’t like her. I guess Marise has no good blood for Mrs. Cary and yet she’d end up with her respect and perhaps liking. Marise has such a way with her.”

  “Marise is quite some girl,” he observed, lighting a cigarette.
“When did I ever say I didn’t like her? The trouble is she has other plans. I don’t know what they are but I’m sure they don’t include me. Anyway she’s in New York, worse luck!”

  “Why, you do like her!”

  He looked carefully at his glowing cigarette. “I like a dozen girls. Let’s get on the Park trolley and go over to Strawberry Mansion. If we can find a court I’ll teach you something about service!”

  “Don’t make me laugh. Why, I’m a runner-up for Helen Wills! Sorry, my boy, promised to go out with Oliver.”

  “Well, what objections do you have to my going too?”

  Thus constantly, despite the difference in ages, they surrounded Oliver with the warmth of their love and care.

  Teresa enjoyed strolling with him in Fairmount Park. She was amazed frequently at the breadth and accuracy of his knowledge, his powers of observation and his memory. The youngster not only knew his way in every direction over the vast tract of land; he knew the names of most of the statues, the history of the park houses. Furthermore, he had picked up, first hand, an adequate and practical knowledge of bird-life. Interests such as these were the merest of hobbies; his real loves lay along the lines of Music, Poetry, and Aviation.

  “Aviation is poetry, Tess,” he said gravely. In his boyish idiom he explained his meaning. “It’s the finest kind of moving around, you know, just as poetry is the finest way of using words.”

  His sister, greatly impressed, spoke to her father. “Oliver really is the best of us all, Dad. The smartest and the finest. . . . If—if you find it hard to give him the kind of training he should have, you can cut down on me. I won’t mind a bit.”

  “That’s all right,” Dr. Cary answered, his arm about her. “By the time Oliver’s ready to try his wings, you’ll be through. . . . I guess the old man can manage a bit longer. Anyway, I’m not going to cut down on my one and only girl . . . except, dear child, I’m afraid I can’t give you that roadster your mother is always talking about.”