“How he sings, how he loves to be heard!” cried Sam with rapture and began to whistle to the bird. It stopped and listened attentively. For months they had been teaching him songs to put into his medley. Sam and the boys were all excellent whistlers.
“And now,” called Sam, “jobs, boys, jobs. Whitey can work up the putty.” He lobbed off the veranda, leading them, and they all joined in his song, “I Know a Bank.”
3 What should be man’s morning work?
The whole community worked. Louie was making the beds; Evie was doing the slops; Mother had decided to make some raspberry tarts, and Aunt Bonnie peeled the potatoes. It was a sizzling, pungent Sunday morning full of oven odors. Bonnie kept bursting into song, and upstairs Louie too could be heard crooning, “Bid me to live and I will live, thy protestant to be.” A great chorus came from the washhouse. Henny was absorbed in her own ideas and hardly heard the jubilaum; besides which, she was so used to what she called the “Pollit buzzing” that she could bear it when the day was fine. She only opened her ears when Louie’s song ceased. That usually meant that Louie was no longer working but was beginning to loiter or to read. In fact, Louie was staring out of the back attic window, southerly, where she could catch a glimpse of the stones of the capital widely tumbled through the river reek: and she was thinking—repeating rather, something from Thoreau, “Morning work! What should be man’s morning work?” But she was not thinking that. She was glowing with pleasure and imagining a harlequinade of scenes in which she, Louie, was acting, declaiming (but not, not like the Pollits, nor like comic-opera Auntie Bonnie), to a vast, shadowy audience stretching away into an opera house as large as the world, with tiers of boxes as high as the Cathedral at least. She had a leading man, a shade of giant proportions, something like Mephisto, but he did not count, she only counted: she projected the shadow of her soul over this dream population, who applauded from time to time with a noise like leaves bowling over the path—as they were doing at this moment in the cement paths of Tohoga House and on the asphalt pavements outside, which she could see at intervals, through the moving shawls of leaves.
Now, at the same time that her stepmother downstairs, conscious of the silence above, was thinking, “I must remember to write Samuel a note to speak to his daughter about her dirt and laziness (only she is so darned callous, she doesn’t listen even to him—),” Louie muttered aloud to herself over the window sill, “If I did not know I was a genius, I would die: why live?”
Evie appeared in the doorway of the boys’ attic. “What did you say, Louie?”
“Nothing; have you finished the slops?”
“Will you carry Auntie Bonnie’s pail down?”
“All right,” said Louie angrily.
Evie went back into the room, drooping, offended. “Mother said you were always to carry it.”
Louie turned on her and bellowed, “I know what Mother said.”
Evie shrank back, startled, her eyes wide open, the pupils enlarged with fear. She had seen an awful sight, Louie in one of her passions. In such a moment, nothing would hold her back, she knew nothing but herself, no one, and the worst thing, more terrifying, was the way she villainously held back the animal in her, while it waited to pounce. Once she had flown to Evie, started to drag her by the hair: once she had burst a boil on Ernie’s temple. She went pale, her rather pale eyes on the contrary becoming dark, and her hair seeming to stiffen.
Louie, for her part, felt her heart sink. She had never seen such a look of terror on her sister’s face: she felt she was a human beast of some sort. She resolved never to let Evie see her anger again. Evie might sink into a fit. One processional sunset, coming home from Baltimore, they had had to get out of the car, carrying Evie stiff and white, to a house on the roadside; and Louie might have made this happen again. She was incapable of caressing her sister, but she said gently,
“Never mind, never mind! I will.”
Of course, the morning, every morning, was full of such incidents. That was family life. They were all able to get through the day without receiving any particular wounds; every such thing left its tiny scar, but their infant skins healed with wonderful quickness.
A roaring broke out downstairs, the sound of the blowtorch with which their father was beginning on the porch handrail. The two girls hung out the window and observed a respectful group of little boys, the Pollit boys and Whitey, and Whitey’s brother, Borden (who had been sent to bring him home).
Saul looked up at an airplane, saw his sisters, and yelled, “Daddy’s using the blowtorch, come and see!”
Little-Sam yelled out above the blowing, “Is that Loolook? Soon time for alevena, Loolook!” Alevena was the eleven o’clock meal, with tea, sandwiches, and fruit, which all the children shared. They had either bananas cut up on bread or sirup-and-butter on bread. Louie hurried down to get it ready. Meantime a wonderful smell of roasting meat and cooking pastry streamed out of the kitchen, and there was in it the smell of slightly roasted linen. Bonnie was ironing blouses for her sister-in-law and herself for the afternoon. Just as Louie had got to the last three steps and had stopped to stare out at the wan, withered, and flourishing world, seen through the blue, yellow, and green panes of the pointed hall window, and at the fire-bellied newts in the aquarium, Henny’s raucous shout came from the kitchen,
“Bonnie, look at you’re doing!”
“Oh, heaven’s sake!”
There was a rush of feet. Louie moved along too. When she got to the door, her mother turned to her at once and said, with concentrated exasperation,
“Look at your darnfool aunt’s done! Look at it, my best blouse! I suppose I’m supposed to go out of this house naked; you’d think they’d put their heads together!” and she flung out of the kitchen into her bedroom. Sam was staring in the window, in consternation, his cheeks flecked with old paint, his mouth open. Bonnie, with her hair damp and tumbled, was holding helplessly in her hands, so that they could see, a blouse so badly burned that the burned piece flapped in and out like a shutter. It was a fine embroidered lawn blouse, which Henny had got from her cousin Laurie, the rich one in Roland Park.
“I just looked round for a second,” Bonnie explained, frightened, looking first at her brother, then at Louie. “I looked out of the window because Pet told me she couldn’t endure the smell of the blowtorch and I thought I’d say alevena—and then I seemed to smell something—I couldn’t tell what, it seemed familiar. You know when there’s a combination of smells, you find it hard to distinguish? When I looked back, there it was smoking up from the board. Such bad luck! I knew it. I knocked over that vase Mrs. Rowings gave me this morning. I’d better break a cup right away. And Pet’s best blouse! Oh, I could cry.” She was crying. “Poor Pet: you can’t blame her,” she pleaded with her brother. A row of little heads, like coconuts, was laid on the sill. Whitey’s brother, Borden, had even come into the kitchen to stare. She was the guilty one, the cynosure of all eyes. Henny was exclaiming in her bedroom,
“Oh, God! What a pack! I’ll shoot myself rather than live in the house with such fools! I must be mad!” Ernest, who had been staring solemnly, unexpectedly burst into a howl, a very comical howl, with his long black eyes shut and his mouth wide open and square: “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he sobbed.
Sam muttered, “You women are always doing such darned-fool things!” He drew his gang away from the window.
“A kitchen is a laboratory: what would anybody think of a laboratory assistant that did things like that? Women need more scientific training!” He suddenly looked away, hearing something, and lunged forward, giving Little-Sam a clip on the ear. The boy had been circling round the blowtorch, fascinated, and had picked it up, merely out of curiosity about its weight. Sam caught the torch out of his son’s hands,
“You disobedient lout!” he shouted, in fear and distress. Little-Sam burst out into a faint yelping. The White boys ranged themselves side by side, entranced by the strange spectacle. Henny had not done exclaiming and now sallied in
to the kitchen where Bonnie was still fumbling and trying to explain everything,
“It was only a second—I don’t understand myself!” Bonnie only received five dollars a month pocket money from her brother who was always in straits and she didn’t see how she could get Henny such another blouse. Henny looked tragic in her long smudged dressing gown, with her hair hanging thin out of untidy braids, and she cried,
“Get upstairs and out of my sight, go on, I’m sick of putting up with you and your nonsense.”
Bonnie, the survivor of many similar scenes, pleaded in a cowardly way, “Pet, I’ll get you another (I don’t know how) but you may be sure”
“Don’t call me Pet. I don’t want you here. I only put up with you and your eternal gossiping and buzzing because you’re too much of a fool to keep a job and your brother wants to keep you off the streets.”
Bonnie flashed, “I work for it: I earn my keep and my—five dollars.”
“Your five dollars, your five dollars, take your five dollars and ram it down your throat,” cried Henny: “do I get even five dollars the months we’re behind? Doesn’t he punish me, the way he punishes the children and all of us? Why are you throwing it up at me? I’d give you more.”
“I could bite my tongue out,” said Bonnie.
“Do you think I get five dollars for slaving my head off for him and his breed, and never getting a decent bite, nor a rag to my back? Do you think I’d care about the silly, stupid thing if I had another rotten rag in my wardrobe to get on my back? You could have it and all the rest of your rot,” she finished impatiently. “Get out of my sight: Louie will help me with the dinner, and then I’m going out, and let them lock me up for a lunatic if I ever set foot again in such a madhouse.”
“What’s the matter, Pet?” asked Bonnie, looking queer. “You’re not yourself Pet: I know this is your offday.”
“Go upstairs and pack,” screamed Henny: “I don’t want you and your filth round the house where my children can see it. Get upstairs and get out or I’ll scream it out to the neighbors.”
Bonnie crimsoned and huffily went into the hall while Sam, with a peculiar inquisitive and guilty air, was standing in the southern door of the hall. When Henny sped out of the kitchen, she saw him and gave him a black look. He said diffidently,
“Pet, don’t make such a noise about it: you’ll get another blouse: from your cousin Laurie, no doubt,” he finished with a faint sneer. Henny went into action at once, glad of the provocation.
“I won’t have your guttersnipe of a sister here, running after every cheap common man she meets in the gutter, staying out on the tiles till all hours, with her commercial travelers, going to their rooms and smoking. I smelled smoke in her room this morning.”
Bonnie, pale with injured pride, was going upstairs without a word. Henny followed her intolerantly to the bottom of the stairs, conscious of Sam’s standing there. Bonnie turned on the fifth or sixth step,
“Henny, how can you? I’ve always been your friend, you know that.”
“Go up, go up at once, or I’ll let them know what you put in the washhouse,” said Henny with a spot of color under her rouge. She flung open the hall door, “I’ll let that man Bannister, across the street, that you think’s so fine, that you’re always showing your legs to, know what I have to put up with.”
Bonnie, pale, looked over the balustrade at her brother, who however said nothing, only looked foolish and helpless there in his overalls, half naked, with spots on his face. She started up the stairs again. Henny rapaciously cried out,
“You used your slip to wipe up a spilled pot; and not satisfied with that, you’ve brought home bedbugs from some dirty low dive you’ve been in, like a sloppy servant girl, and the mice go there to eat up all the greasy crumbs you’ve got in little bags in your dressing table. You were born in the slums and bring the slums with you into my house, you and your rotten, slave-driving brother. And the whole place looks like a slaughterhouse.”
Bonnie began to bawl and they heard her tripping up the next pair of stairs. Behind her back Henny still cried out vile things, while Samuel with that intimidated but sordid expression moved away with his little tribe towards the back porch. He called out suddenly,
“Loozy! Alevena!”
He put out the blowtorch and gathered the children round him in the long dining room and looked out through the open northern window for a minute without speaking. They saw his wet eyelashes. Then he put one arm round Evie and one round the silent, mystified Tommy, drew them to him, and said,
“Let’s be quiet together, kids. I wanted us to be so happy today, happy and rejoicing because your poor little Sam loves you and is doing what is best for everyone.”
Looking at them all tenderly, he cut up the fruit himself and poured out the tea. On Sunday they were all allowed to have tea all day to be with him.
“Thick for the lads, thin for the girls,” said Sam, suiting the action to the words as he handed out the slices of bread.
“Now masticate, denticate, chump, chew, and swallow.” Then he fell silent again, and nothing was heard for a space but the mild breeze blowing through the hall and making the gong vibrate softly, ton, ton!
Gently Sam leaned over his baby, “Tomkins, here!” Tommy reached his fat face to his father. To the boy’s pouted lips he joined his own, siphoning the chewed sandwich into Tommy’s mouth.
“Not only for the ptyalin,” Sam communicated to them, “which is now already mixed with the food and helps Tommy to digest, but also for the communization of germs. Tommy will not, I think, suffer from the dyspepsia that all you other kids do. All you other kids are like your poor little Sam—your heads go whizz, and your digestion doesn’t agree! Good digestion is for the bovine. But Tomkins, though not strictly bovine, will probably be a prize fighter, and so I’m helping him along. I used to do this to Looloo when she was a little girl and lost her mother.” He stopped for a moment sadly, as always when harking back to Rachel and his short marriage with her. “I had to be mother and father too, to little Looloo. This is what parent birds sometimes do to their nestlings. We were very close then,” he continued, looking Louie over intently, “and communicated by thought alone: she could hardly speak, but we each knew what the other was thinking, because she was the child of a great love!”
He passed a thin sandwich to Evie. He nodded all round the table at the exercising jaws, “Looloo still loves her father too, although she pretends to be so unfeeling and so cussed.” He looked at her again and began to laugh. Very annoyed, with a stern face, Louie pretended not to hear. “Come here, my Looloo!” She got up and came to his side, rather shyly. “Right here!” Surprised, she came closer. Mottled with contained laughter, he stretched his mouth to hers, trying to force the banana into her mouth with his tongue, but she broke away, scattering the food on the floor and down the front of her much spotted smock, while everyone clamored and laughed. Sam himself let out a bellow of laughter, but managed to say,
“Get a floor cloth, Looloo-girl: you ought to do what I say!”
With a confused expression, the girl trudged to the kitchen and came back to clean the floor. When she got up she was scarlet with the exertion. She cleaned the cloth and then let herself out dreamily into the yard. Clouds were passing over, swiftly staining the garden, the stains soaking in and leaving only bright light again. Louie forgot the incident completely as a dream.
This messiness was only like all Louie’s contacts with physical objects. She dropped, smashed, or bent them; she spilled food, cut her fingers instead of vegetables and the tablecloth instead of meat. She was always shamefaced and clumsy in the face of that nature which Sam admired so much, an outcast of nature. She slopped liquids all over the place, stumbled and fell when carrying buckets, could never stand straight to fold the sheets and tablecloths from the wash without giggling or dropping them in the dirt, fell over invisible creases in rugs, was unable to do her hair neatly, and was always leopard-spotted yellow and blue with old and n
ew bruises. She shut drawers on her fingers and doors on her hands, bumped her nose on the wall, and many a time felt like banging her head against the wall in order to reach oblivion and get out of all this strange place in time where she was a square peg in a round hole.
There was a picture of a sweet, gay, shy little girl with curls all over her head, in an old frame in her father’s room. She could hardly believe that she, the legend of the family, whom everyone had a right to correct, had been that little girl. She wondered vaguely, from time to time, if she would have been any different if her mother had lived. But she did not believe it, and the picture of a yearning, tragic, sickly young woman that Sam drew did not catch her fancy. She was not like that: she felt a growling, sullen power in herself which was merely darkness to the splendid sunrise that she felt certain would flash in her in a few years. She acknowledged her unwieldiness and unhandiness in this little world, but she had an utter contempt for everyone associated with her, father, stepmother, even brothers and sister, an innocent contempt which she had never thought out, but which those round her easily recognized. It enraged Henny beyond expression: “the Pollit snobbishness!” she would say ten times a day. But it fell on deaf ears. Louie knew she was the ugly duckling. But when a swan she would never come sailing back into their village pond; she would be somewhere away, unheard of, on the lily-rimmed oceans of the world. This was her secret. But she had many other intimations of destiny, like the night rider that no one heard but herself. With her secrets, she was able to go out from nearly every one of the thousand domestic clashes of the year and, as if going through a door into another world, forget about them entirely. They were the doings of beings of a weaker sort.
Henny was annoyed to see the tribe bow before herself in the role of virago; she had not been brought up to think that she would succeed because of a mean disposition. She had been nurtured in the idea that she was to be a great lady, like the old-time beauties of the South. So now she hurried to dress herself and get out of a house where all her hopes had been ruined and where she was forced by circumstances to slur and smut herself to herself. She was restless, full of spite, contempt, and unhappiness—what a spineless crowd, a Baltimore slum breed, the spawn of a man who had begun by taking the kicks and orders of some restaurant keeper or fish handler at the age of twelve and so had never learned independence! The worst was that they looked upon her as an heiress, and she hadn’t a nickel in her purse and was forced to go into debt to keep the breed alive. She had no car she could use and was forced on a Sunday (Funday!) to rattle downtown in a streetcar, hungry and without a clean blouse. She supposed she could have forced some money out of him, but she hadn’t the patience or the interest to carry on her victory. She was sunk for life. Old David Collyer would never take her back, and what other man seriously wanted a woman with five children even if the Collyer estate was free of debt? She did not care two ticks whether she won victories over such cowards or not: they had won the final victory over her.
The Man Who Loved Children Page 10