She saw Bert, shining with health, bursting in through the door, his hat still on his head to hide his thinning hair. He looked young, presentable, with a tight red skin and a thick irrepressible black beard newly ground off to skin level, jutting nose and chin, bright black eyes, and a ready grin; the lips were too red, the teeth too white in this grin, one thought, at first meeting. He bustled down to her, holding out both hands, and hailing her,
“Well, I’m not late, I’m not late. I told you one-fifteen, didn’t I?” He looked round for a hook for his hat, then pressed her mouth with his cushiony lips.
“You’re good to me, Bert, to come running when I get a freak and ring you up.”
“Bert Anderson, always on tap,” he affirmed. “I’m your guy, aren’t I? If not me, then who? Maybe you’ve got someone else.” He chuckled. “Well, what are we eating? And drinking? Cigarette? Smoking? No oysters I guess for the daughter of Paty du Clam? You don’t mind if I do? Hello, hello there! How’s things, Mullarkey? What’s new? That’s fine, that’s fine!” He gave their order and then, one hand washing another, leaned over the table to Henny,
“Now then, what’s new? Want to hear the latest? Did you hear about the fellow who had a nag racing out at Bowie? He kind of liked the horse and took it out a few magazines to read in the stable. The horse just looked and turned back to eat its hay. The little dog burst out laughing, and said, ‘Hey, you don’t think a horse can read, do you?’ ”
“Where’s the joke?” asked Henny.
“Ha, ha, ha—ha, ha, ha,” roared Bert, “you don’t see it! Did you hear about the two dickybirds who were sitting on a tree and one said, ‘That’s Hitler!’ and the other said, ‘What are you waiting for?’ ”
“What an idiot!” said Henny, laughing. “Oh, I’ll admit one thing, I get a good laugh with you. That young miss at the telephone sounded snippety. I heard what she said!”
“I know,” he howled cheerfully, “I told her to cover the goddam mouthpiece when she made a silly crack like that. ‘Well, how old is she, anyhow?’ the kid said. I said, ‘Oh, about thirty-two, thirty-three,’ I told her. ‘Well, what did I say? I said an old lady,’ the kid said; ‘what is she beefing about?’ I told her, ‘That’s a lady, something you don’t know about.’ I won’t tell you what she said, since you are a real lady!”
“No, but you’re dying to,” said Henny with a grimace, “I should like a stiff drink. I wish the churches and the smug big shots with cellars of their own hadn’t passed this law.”
“Good old Sinai, good old Jenkins Hill,” cried Bert, “got to make the nation’s capital safe for the bug-eyed tourist. I guarantee Samuel the Righteous thinks it’s fine.”
Henny shrugged, “Of course, he thinks that if he could get in and have half an hour’s talk with President Roosevelt, he would banish alcohol for his term from the White House. The reason he knew Woodrow Wilson was God Almighty was that prohibition came in in his presidency. I sometimes think I live in the White House—or I think Samuel thinks so—” she shrugged again. “I can’t understand why he never went into politics, with his gift of the gab and greensward style!”
Bert laughed interrogatively.
“Biggity style, all in the higher regions. I wish to all creation he’d picked out another woman, for his own sake, too.”
“Maybe he will,” Bert consoled her.
Henny laughed bitterly. “You know his favorite quotation? ‘Good name in man and woman is the immediate jewel of their souls.’ The children, Dad’s money, his fat job, his reputation with all the high and mighty people he knows!” She laughed in an embarrassed way, “And he believes men should be virgins when they marry!”
“Holy mackerel!”
“We had our first fight over that. I simply didn’t believe him! Now I do. And all the rest goes with it—no cards, no dirty jokes, no drinks, no smokes, no lively books. When I married him he had more than four thousand books and not one novel! He lectured me so when he caught me with one of Hassie’s library books that I didn’t dare read a novel for six months. But like all hypocrites and sneaks, it’s all right if it has another label. He lets that child of his read stuff about hysteria—nuns having fits in convents and dreaming the Old One has what he might have for all I know, and animals breeding and old customs on European farms and all sorts of rot he lets that child of eleven read, because it’s science! She drives me mad with her reading. She’s that Big-Me all over again. Always with her eyes glued to a book. I feel like snatching the rotten thing from her and pushing it into her eyes, into her great lolling head: I’d like to stew the rotten books in one of my jam pans and make them both eat it. The feast of learning he’s always talking about! I’d like to see their great bellies swell with their dirty scientific books the way he makes mine with wind and—” she stopped. Bert meekly ate his oysters and drank his wine.
“Now the mistake you make, young Henrietta, is that you think about these things all the time,” said Bert, after a pause. “Now look at me,” he coaxed, “suppose I started to worry over the fact that my old man never turned an honest cent in his life, but scrounged on me, his kid, eh?”
“You know, Bert,” she said, trembling slightly, “the impulse to kill him becomes so strong sometimes, when I think of the way he’s taken my life and trampled all over it and then thinks it’s sufficient if he reads a few highbrow books, that I don’t know how to get over it. I clench my fists together to keep from rushing at his greasy yellow head, or throwing something into that noisy mouth, forever boasting and screaming. If I could kill him and that child,” she said, “I’d gladly do time for it. But what would the kids do? Go to an asylum? No one would stand it. No one could stand it. Hassie, who only has one kid anyhow, says, ‘Compromise, compromise!’ She wouldn’t compromise; she has a meek little skinned rat of man who runs out all over the streets anyhow and goes to bars with queer fish, while she stays at home and runs the business; what does she know about compromise? The very one who tells me to compromise wouldn’t compromise for half a minute. He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him. It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on. I have to stuff mattresses because we haven’t enough money to buy new ones! Look at my hands!”
She showed him her worn hands. The skin was darkened by dirt ground in and snowy in patches, where the coarse soap had bitten it.
“And I rub in hand lotion every day,” she said bitterly. “They say in the magazines, look after yourself and your husband will love you. If love was got by a woman giving her last drop of blood to wash the clothes in and her last shred of skin to carpet the house with, I wouldn’t get it, and he wouldn’t notice it. He is injured, if you don’t mind! He boasts and screams about how cheap he buys his clothes for a man in his position, and what he gives up for the kids! He writes poems to himself on the subject: and what about me? I’m the heiress: I’m the rich woman who can stop up all the holes and darn all the tatters in her underwear and borrow old coats from her sister and beg old-fashioned jackets from her cousins, and I don’t sacrifice at all. It is all on account of me. The whole thing is due to my bad management.” Bert raised his eyes quizzically and held up his pencil,
“Henny, why can’t you make a go of it on eight thousand a year? You pay fifty dollars a month rent to your old man, that’s all.”
“What?” cried Henny indignantly, “Food alone costs me three thousand and more a year. Everything is budgeted to the minimum, and it never works out. You know how much I had to spend on the two girls last year? Thirty-two dollars. Hassie gave me a dress for Evie, but she detests Louisa and will never give me a thing for her. There isn’t a person in the family her size, she’s so enormous, and I can’t get any hand-me-downs for her. And I waste money! So says the Professor. The house is falling to pieces: there are always repairs. That’s why we got it so cheap. Dad couldn’t sell it. And you know the taxes we have to pay on that white eleph
ant.”
Bert pocketed his pencil helplessly. “You’re right. Isn’t it funny: if you get seven hundred and fifty a year or eight thousand a year, it’s never enough! But—” he looked at her, “Well, what’s the use? You would have all those kiddies.”
“Oh, don’t let’s talk about it,” she cried feverishly. “I didn’t come here to talk about him and my troubles.”
“That’s right, that’s right, that’s a good girl! Here, we’ll have a drop more wine, just to celebrate the transwafting of Samuel the Righteous to parts unknown.”
“If he gives the household money to me in a lump sum,” she said more thoughtfully, “you see I can pay off some of my old debts. When I was so terribly strapped after Ernie came, I just borrowed right and left—I hadn’t the faintest idea how to run a house, and I only had Hazel Moore five months before Samuel quarreled with her. I blush, even in my own room, when I think I never paid Connie O’Meara the hundred. She must think I’m a cheap chiseler! I’ll pay her first.” She laughed excitedly, “Here I am spending it all already. How much do you think I have in my purse?”
“A buck?” His manner was a little less jovial than it had been up to now. She noticed this and flashed a look of contempt at his great curly head, bent over the plate. He was stowing food away in his usual elephantine manner, seeming to have three or four hands which were all in operation, moving quickly in different directions, seizing bread, sugar, cream, and so on. She decided to punish him,
“Ten cents!”
“How come?”
“Ernie tore his pants. She had to have new stuff for a dress. I hope I’ll be able to palm her off on Eleanor again this summer, if her own relatives at Harpers Ferry won’t take her.”
“Do they use any propaganda against the stepmother out there?”
“If they did, she wouldn’t know it. I don’t know what passes in that girl’s head, it isn’t anything normal. I just know that if she makes up her mind to do a thing, she’ll do it: and it isn’t just her damned obstinacy, although I yell at her that it is: it’s that she’s deaf.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No, not deaf! She doesn’t know there’s anyone else alive walking this earth but herself. So if she wants to do it, she’ll do it and if you cut her fingers off, she wouldn’t know it, she’d just go and do it. She’s terrible. She’s a horrible sort of beast, it seems to me sometimes. She crawls, I can hardly touch her, she reeks with her slime and filth—she doesn’t notice! I beat her until I can’t stand—she doesn’t notice! When I fall on the floor, she runs and gets a pillow and at that I suppose she’s better than her murderer of a father who lets me lie there. And if she whimpers a bit or bellows, she’ll go right off the next minute with a face like a stone and stare and moon away at some book and forget everything I’ve screamed at her. I show her the veins sticking out on my hands and ask her if she isn’t ashamed. But I’m waiting a bit till she gets a bit older and punishes her father for all he’s made me suffer: or she’ll take it out on some other man. Someone will catch a beauty.”
Bert laughed, “Revenge is a wild kind of justice! Not mine, Lord Bacon’s: I had no idea you were such a vengeful tiger.”
“I’d drink his blood but it would make me vomit,” she said, with pain. “When I think that in a few months I’m going to be the stepmother not of a child but of a woman and a woman with his nature, I want to commit suicide. Why should I go through with it?”
“Say, would you like to take a stroll?” inquired Bert. “Or how about the movies? Then we can take a drink at home after, if you like.”
“Yes, you’re right, Bert. It’s cool there and I can have some quiet. It’s just that he’s painting and scraping and singing and jigging from crack of dawn and he wants to take up my bedroom floor now, so for weeks I’ll have to sleep with a bed full of sand and dirt and a floor covered with old sacks. It’s insane.”
“Thank God I’m not a handy man,” said Bert sighing.
“Yes, you are, handy,” she concluded, with a queer sideways glance. He laughed. When he got up to get his hat, she stood, pulling on her gloves, and looking up at his face which was turned from her. Suppose she lost him by yowling too much? For a moment she had a tinge of real love for the man. He was a queer sort. He would not marry anyone. He went out with, and no doubt lied to, girl after girl—nice romantic girls too; and though such a bounder, he looked like the ideal husband, stalwart, husky, bighearted, a good-time-Charlie, pretty sensible, and easy enough to handle, open to flattery, to pathos. There he was in a crisis, always helping her out in a friendly way. He even lent small amounts of money, showing her the amounts in his little vest-pocket book and saying, with a good-natured but meaningful slap, as she put it away, “It’s there, it’s mounting up: but you’ll pay me off when the dividends come, won’t you, young Henrietta?” She thought today she would get five dollars out of him.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 Scandal in Pollitry.
AT THREE IN THE afternoon Aunt Josephine Pollit, tall, blue-eyed, with hail-fellow-well-met dental set came through the gate at a lively pace, though she was putting on a hearty middle age. She carried herself as if she were a yellow solid valise cheerfully borne by a successful commercial traveler. She carried other things with her, a light coat, an umbrella, a purse, a book, and a package. When the twins came flying down the path, she shifted the parcel to the other hand and patted them while kissing them heartily.
“Are you glad to see your Auntie, twinnies? Where’s Mother? Is your mother inside?”
“Mother’s out.”
“Out! Didn’t anyone tell her your Auntie Jo was coming? Oh, isn’t that too bad! I must see her! I must see Samuel! Where is your father? Come inside, chickies, Auntie has something for you—later on.”
“Ooch!” they shrieked dutifully, and “What?”
“In a minute, must wait for Auntie to get her things off. Where’s Auntie Bonnie? Is she out too? Now, who’s going to get their auntie a glass of water?”
“Me, Auntie!” said Little-Sam.
“ ‘I,’ you mean, Sammy: ‘I will, Auntie.’ ”
He grinned bashfully and started towards the house.
“Where’s your father? (‘I will, Auntie!’) Now!”
“I will, Auntie,” he shouted from the door as he fled into the house.
“On the roof painting the roof,” said Saul.
“On the roof! On Sunday afternoon! Tell him I’m here! Sam! Samuel! Tell him I’m here!” She sniffed grandly and marched into the house. But Sam had spied her from the roof top and now he cringed and whined at Saul, over the guttering.
“Ask Josie did she bring me a little bit of choc? She always brings me sumpin.”
“Oo Taddy!” said Evelyn, going scarlet.
“Go on, kids,” whined Sam piteously, “ask Josie if she’s got anyfink for pore little Sam; I won’t come down unless. En I might fall on my head, I might get sunstroke, anyfink might happen to me up here!”
“Oo, Taddy, you said never to ask for anything,” Evie said very gravely.
“Gwan, kids,” squeaked Sam, “tell her she’s got to bribe me. Oh, oh, I’m falling: vertigo’s going to get me, my head’s going round. All because of no choc. Got to have some!”
“Don’t say it,” Louie ordered them fiercely from the veranda, “don’t you go and say that.”
“Gwan, boys,” urged Sam more miserably and shamefully than before, “want a little bit o’ choc, even one little tablet, I’ll even take a crumb. She’s got to send me up a bit: or she’s got to send out and buy a bit.”
Louie rushed out and planted herself in view of her father. “I won’t let them,” she shouted. The children hung about, not knowing what to do.
Jo had gone inside and taken off her hat. She shook back the dazzling yellow furze of curls that could never be smoothed down and powdered her nose. She beamed at the discussion outside, but when they came to this impasse, she strode to the veranda and shouted,
“I’
ve got some chocolate for you, Samuel; come down! I’ve got to talk to you!”
“You bring it up,” whined and scraped Sam, perilously over the guttering; although he suffered from vertigo and vertigo’s nausea, he could never resist a comedy.
“Come down and don’t be a fool,” trumpeted Jo. “I have to talk to you!”
Sam grinned and started to come down the ladder,
“Josie used to yell that from the back window in Lombard Street; when I used to drag home carcasses and fishbones to make fertilizer—you remember, Jo? Phew! What a stench! Josie would bang up the window and yell down the street, ‘Father, speak to that boy! Sam, don’t be a fool!’ And bang went the window again.”
“Come down to earth,” cried Jo impatiently, “Samuel, stop acting the goat!” She started to frown, but a smile broke through. She went up to her youngest brother and kissed him, saying more gently than before,
“Come in and get your chocolate and Louie will make us some coffee. Louie dear, come here, come and kiss Auntie, dear!” She looked her up and down, ran her hand through Louie’s helpless waterfall of hair and proclaimed, “Louie’s getting to be a big girl now: she’s going to be just like me. Only straight hair! I was something like you at your age, dear! You’re going to be just like me. I hope!” she sniffed cheerfully and laughed aloud. “Run along, dear!” And now this Juno frowned and demanded, “Is Bonnie here?”
“I think Bonniferous is snoozing,” Sam replied.
“A most disgraceful thing,” said Joe, “absolutely preposterous. Sam you must insist, absolutely insist, that she stop seeing this wretched man, that card-trick horror: it’s disgraceful! To think that a sister of mine should go out with a man like that, and a married man! You must stop it! I insist upon it, Samuel!”
Sam became very grave, laid his hand on his sister’s arm, and led her away from the children into the sunroom, which ran south and north and was entered from the long dining room. This was a beautiful, quiet room, with a high conservatory window looking out on the orchard, lined with books and containing Henny’s piano. The children stayed outside to play, for they were tired by the heavy painting job of the day. Louie made coffee. From time to time they heard the upright Jo and austere Sam in a passionate discussion somewhere in a corner of the house, or saw her stalking up and down in the sunroom, taking off her pince-nez, putting them on, tossing her head like a draft horse, sniffing, the sun shining through her loofah hair as she paused between the curtains, to give her nephews a good-natured look.
The Man Who Loved Children Page 14