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.
2 Sam comes home.
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.”
On Shank’s ponies he could have got home that afternoon in less than an hour, crossing the Key Bridge from Rosslyn, when the naturalists left the new bird sanctuary on Analostan Island. But today Sam was the hero of his Department and of the naturalists because he had got the long-desired appointment with the Anthropological Mission to the Pacific, and not only would he have his present salary plus traveling expenses, but his appointment was a bold step forward on his path of fame.
Sam looked, as he passed, at a ramshackle little house, something like the wretched slum he had once boarded in with his brother at Dundalk, out of Baltimore, and a smile bared his teeth.
“Going to glory,” said Sam:
“I’ve come a long way, a long, long way, Brother. Eight thousand a year and expenses—and even Tohoga House, in Georgetown, D.C., lovely suburb of the nation’s capital; and the children of poor Sam Pollit, bricklayer’s son, who left school at twelve, are going to university soon, under the flashing colonnades of America’s greatest city, in the heart of the democratic Athens, much greater than any miserable Athens of the dirt grubbers of antiquity, yes—I feel sober, at rest. The old heart doesn’t flutter: I must be careful not to rest on my laurels now—haste not, rest not! I feel free!” Sam began to wonder at himself; why did he feel free? He had always been free, a free man, a free mind, a freethinker. “By Gemini,” he thought, taking a great breath, “this is how men feel who take advantage of their power.”
Sam looked round him—just ahead was Volta Place, where Dribble Smith, his friend in the Treasury, lived. He chuckled, hearing Dribble practicing his scales inside, to his daughter’s accompaniment. Passing Smith’s hedge, Sam said half aloud,
“What it must be, though, to taste supreme power!”
He thought of his long-dead mother, who came from the good old days when mothers dreamed of their sons’ being President, Poor woman, good woman: she little thought when she dropped a tear at my being sent to work in the fish market that in the fish market I would meet my fate. Ahead of him, not far uphill, was his harbor and his fate.
“Another thing,” said Sam to himself, “is that going away now, Madeleine and I will have time to use our heads, get things straight: the love that harms another is not love—but what desires beset a man! They are not written in the calendar of a man’s duty; they are part of the secret life. Some time the secret life rises and overwhelms us—a tidal wave. We must not be carried away. We have each too much to lose.” He strode on, “Forget, forget!” He struggled to remember something else, something cheerful. They had taken him to Dirty Jack’s house to celebrate his appointment; there they had made merry, Sam being at the top of his form. There was a young creature there, timid, serious, big-eyed, with a black crop who turned out to be Dirty Jack’s (that is, Old Roebuck’s) only daughter, the one who did the charming flower painting. What an innocent, attentive face! It positively flamed with admiration; and the child-woman’s name was Gillian. He had made up a poem on the spur of the moment:
Gillian, my Gillian,
He would be a villy-un,
Who would be dally-dillyin’
About a Lacertilian
When he could look at you!
“By Jiminy!” ejaculated Sam, who had strange oaths, since he could never swear foul ones, “genius burns: nothing succeeds like success! And did Dirty Jack jerk back his head and give me one of those looks of his with his slugs of eyes, to intimidate me; whereas, no one noticed him at all, at all, poor old Dirty Jack.” He began to hum with his walking, “Oh, my darling Nelly Gray, they have taken you away.”
“By Gee,” he exclaimed half aloud, “I am excited! A pity to come home to a sleeping house, and what’s not asleep is the devil incarnate; but we’re a cheerful bunch, the Pollits are a cheerful bunch. But wait till my little gang hears that they’re going to lose their dad for a nine-month! There’ll be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!” and Sam clapped his hands together. He loved this Thirty-fourth Street climb, by the quiet houses and under the trees. He had first come this way, exploring the neighborhood, a young father and widower, holding his year-old Louisa in his arms, with her fat bare legs wagging, and, by his side, elegant, glossy-eyed Miss Henrietta Collyer, a few months before their marriage; and that was ten years ago. Then afterwards, with each and all of the children, up and down and round about, taking them to the Observatory, the parks, the river, the woodland by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, or walking them out to Cabin John, teaching them birds, flowers, and all denizens of the woodland.
Now Old David Collyer’s Tohoga House, Sam’s Tohoga House, that he called his island in the sky, swam above him. A constellation hanging over that dark space midmost of the hill, which was Tohoga’s two acres, was slowly swamped by cloud.
He came up slowly, not winded, but snuffing in the night of the hot streets, looking up at the great house, tree-clouded. Now he crossed P Street and faced the hummock. On one side the long galvanized-iron back fence of his property ran towards Thirty-fifth Street and its strip of brick terrace slums. Over this fence leaned the pruned boughs of giant maples and oaks. The old reservoir was away to the right. A faint radiance showed Sam that the light in the long dining room was on. He ran up the side steps and stole across the grass behind the house, brushing aside familiar plants, touching with his left hand the little Colorado blue spruce which he had planted for the children’s “Wishing-Tree” and which was now five feet high.
He was just on six feet and therefore could peer into the long room. It ran through the house and had a window looking out at the front to R Street. A leaved oak table stood in the center and at the table, facing him, sitting in his carving chair, was his eldest child, Louisa, soon twelve years old, the only child of his dead first wife, Rachel. Louie was hunched over a book and sat so still that she seemed alone in the house. She did nothing while he looked at her but turn a page and twist one strand of her long yellow hair round and round her finger, a trick of her father’s. Then without Sam having heard anything, she lifted her head and sat stock-still with her gray eyes open wide. She now rose stiffly and looked furtively at the window behind her. Sam heard nothing but the crepitations of arboreal night. Then he noticed that the window was sliding gently down. Louisa advanced jerkily to this magically moving window and watched it as it fitted itself into the sill. Then she shook her head and turning to the room as if it were a person she laughed soundlessly. It was nothing but the worn cords loosening. She opened the window and then shut it again softly, but leaned against the pane looking up into the drifting sky, seeking something in the street. She had been there, and Sam, whistling softly Bringing Home the Sheaves, was about to go inside, when a thin, dark scarecrow in an off-white wrapper—Henrietta, his wife—stood in the doorway. Through the loose window frame he heard her threadbare words,
“You’re up poring over a book with lights flaring all over the house at this hour of the night. You look like a boiled owl! Isn’t your father home yet?”
“No, Mother.”
“Why is your knee bleeding? Have you been picking the scab again?”
Louie hung her head and looked at her knee, crossed with old scars and new abrasions and bruises: she flushed and the untidy hair fell over her face.
“Answer, answer, you sullen beast!”
“I bumped it.”
“You lie all the time.”
The child straightened with wide frowning eyes, pulled back her arms insolently. Henny rushed at her with hands outstretched and thrust her firm bony fingers round the girl’s neck, squeezing and saying, “Ugh,” twice. Louisa looked up into her stepmother’s face, squirming, but not trying to get away, questioning her silently, needing to understand, in an affinity of misfortune. Henrietta dropped her arms quickly and gripped her own neck with an expression of disgust, then pushed the girl away with both hands; and as she flounced out of the room, cried,
“I ought to put us all out of our misery!”
Louisa moved back to her chair and stood beside it, looking down at the book. Then she sank into the chair and, putting her face on both hands, began to read again.
Sam turned his back to the house and looked south, over the dark, susurrous orchard, towards the faint lights of Rosslyn. A zephyr stole up the slope as quietly as a nocturnal animal and with it all the domestic scents, wrapping Sam’s body in peace. Within, a torment raged, day and night, week, month, year, always the same, an endless conflict, with its truces and breathing spaces; out here were a dark peace and love.
“Mother Earth,” whispered Sam, “I love you, I love men and women, I love little children and all innocent things, I love, I feel I am love itself—how could I pick out a woman who would hate me
so much!”
Surefooted he moved way down to the animal cages, heard them stir uneasily, and spoke to the raccoon,
“Procyon! Procyon! Here’s little Sam!” But the raccoon refused to come to the wire. He went up the slope again, thinking, Fate puts brambles, hurdles in my path, she even gives me an Old Woman of the Sea, to try me, because I am destined for great things.
When Sam came into the hall there was no light anywhere on the ground floor. The saffron dark through his sitting room at the head of the first flight of stairs showed that Louie was in her bedroom. She had heard his whistle and had rushed upstairs with her book.
The Man Who Loved Children Page 6