The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  “Right is right, and wrong is wrong,” she proclaimed through the window, “and any man, woman, or child with a sense of decency would refuse to speak to him. I won’t hear any more about it; and there’s an end of it. It must and will be stopped! He has a wife. If I had ever imagined that anyone in my family could so much as think of such a thing as attacking the holy bonds of matrimony—there’s no excuse whatever. Be sure that sin will find you out! And if she persists, you must send her away. I am sure Henny agrees with me. I myself will speak to Henny. When I heard of it, to my face, I nearly died of shame. And it was Miss Critchmar who told me! Suppose they want to elect me to the chapter—and a rumor like that gets round? What will I say? How could I show my face?”

  “It wouldn’t be your fault, Jo,” said Sam seriously, “but of course we will stop it.”

  “Such an abomination cannot go on. She must be stopped,” Jo said. “It makes me sick. And just when I had discovered that one of our ancestors, Sam, fought in the American Revolution. This genealogist assured me that there were several of our name and one certainly is a relative. And just then this bombshell comes along and hits me amidships! I was so horrified, Sam, I didn’t sleep for five nights! You can imagine the state I was in! Where is the stupid girl?”

  “Upstairs. I’ll send for her.”

  “I’ll go myself! Don’t move! I shall give her a talking-to she’ll not forget in a hurry. Disgusting. Oh, it’s disgusting! A sister of mine! How could she! What is the matter with her, Sam? Mother was such a splendid character and you and I have never committed a sin in our lives. I believe that. I am not a Pharisee! I wish that you would go to church, Sam, but I must say that for a nonbeliever you lead an exemplary life. But of course, Father’s example—” she stopped, seeing Louie with the coffee, and then continued nobly, “Father could have been a better man.”

  “Well, that’s not to the point now,” Sam said quietly. “Perhaps you’d better leave it to me, Jo. I’ll find out how things stand. Don’t accuse without evidence. An evil tongue can do more harm than two foolish people—probably no more than foolish, remember! Make allowance for mere harmless folly, Jo.”

  “That’s a lot of bosh and you know it! A married man! What must he be thinking about Bonnie, your sister, Sam? If you think I’m going to put up with it, you’re much mistaken. I’m surprised at your being so weak-kneed, Sam, you so decent; you were always so decent. I always do my duty. Some people don’t like me for it, but I know why.”

  Sam interjected, “Jo, you are not the avenging angel, you must be human in these matters. I have more experience than you.”

  “More? How more? You mean you’re married. Rubbish! I have to deal with mothers and their problems all day long, too. They confide in me. I have a big following among the mothers. My opinion is objective just because I do not deal with compromise. Not that you do, Sam; I know you’ve always been good—the best; I don’t say that. You’re the best boy that ever was. You’re too soft, that’s all, so you can’t handle this.”

  Sam motioned to her to sit down; and she did so, “You see, Jo, I used to be like you, I thought just the same way. I understand how you feel. But you are wrong, believe me; you cannot dragoon human beings even in the name of morality. It is kindness, human love, and patience with human weakness that is necessary. Remember this is your own sister, ten years my junior, and I know little enough how to run my own affairs! Be kind to her. Go and speak to her—I admit it’s a woman’s place: but be kind.”

  “I will never be kind to weak wickedness,” cried Jo, bouncing up and tossing back her head; “be sure of that, Samuel.”

  “Run out, Looloo,” said Sam, to the little girl who had just brought in the coffee tray.

  “And another thing,” cried Jo, more moderately, “I want to ask you about my income tax, Sam, about the deductions. A man came to ask me questions. I’m perfectly sure I’m overassessed; and I can’t sleep at night with the pneumatic drilling in the streets; and I couldn’t get half that price if I really tried to sell it. I’m going to get a loan to put in improvements—but what’s the use really? I ought to lease it to a boardinghouse keeper who would give me my rents regularly and I shouldn’t have to worry. It all keeps me awake and I can’t afford to lose sleep over a lot of irresponsible people. That old woman with the rosary on her bed only comes once a fortnight to get her relief, or when she had a fight with her son-in-law. That nice German, such a decent fellow and a good tenant, is going to his homeland to see his parents. Such a studious man, nice and quiet; and those two awful Italians didn’t work for four days. They went out on a beer party and got stinking drunk and didn’t work. My house is simply going down, and I haven’t time to do it up, put them out, and get decent tenants. That horrible little thing on the first floor is going to have another baby and the first one hardly with a tooth, she doesn’t get through washing the dishes till eleven o’clock or twelve and then another bedraggled girl comes with her baby carriage and there they sit in the dark, in the damp, and chatter and cook a bit of spaghetti, and that shiftless tramp with a cigarette stuck between his lips when he hasn’t enough to eat even and the rent not paid. It makes me sick, such shiftless horrible people in the world, and they are the ones the government supports! Can you understand it, Sam? I can’t. And in the house next to mine is a woman with a piece of land in the country, who gets relief. Isn’t it wicked, Sam? Oh, you don’t know what’s going on, Sam, because you’re in a government department and you don’t meet people as I do. I have to meet them face to face, I have to actually speak to these awful creatures, because they are my tenants, and I have to worry about the plumbing for them. Do you think they’re pleased with anything? No, you don’t know a lot yourself, Sam. That’s what I say. Don’t throw it up at me that I’m not married; for I could easily have been married, but I just said, ‘No, no, I’m waiting for Mr. Right.’ What do you think of that, Sam? Another baby, with one nine months old, it just makes me sick.”

  “Maybe they like children,” said Sam, grinning.

  “Tommyrot, it’s sheer improvidence and shiftlessness!” said Jo, indignantly, staring at her brother. “They owe me three weeks’ rent now! Stop being a giddy goat, Sam. Now, there, I’ve had my coffee and I’m going up to speak to that girl. I’ll bring her to her senses.”

  Jo went upstairs boiling with self-respect. Henny referred to her agreeably as that “great blond beast, deaf, dumb, and blind to all but self, self, self”; and Sam said that “Jo was a very good woman, but not broadminded”; and Bonnie always said, with a laugh, “Jo’s a good soul, poor thing!” Bonnie had been taking forty winks in her room, drunk with the heat, when Jo’s irruption into the house had wakened her. She had at once applied her ear to the stairway well and heard most of what had been said to Sam by Jo. If she could have got out of the house, she would have, but it was impossible; the foot of the stair was at the dining-room door. Bonnie even considered climbing out of her window and trying to reach the porch and shin down the porch posts, a thing that she surely would have done ten years ago. But she could not do it here. With relief she had heard the voices of two little girls in the room opposite hers. Evie and Isabel were playing Mothers, Evie’s favorite and perpetual game. Evie was a lady with a baby, and Isabel was her little girl going to school, a distribution of roles which had never varied. Isabel went to school (in the corner), put up her hand, scribbled on the floor, and after a surprisingly short morning came home for lunch. At lunch she was invariably rude to her mother and had to be slapped. After lunch she always refused to go back to school and had to be ordered out of the house in a cranky voice. While she was in afternoon school, the mother would change her baby’s diaper, croon to it, smack it, teach it, and repeat infinitely the little attentions that Evie really had had to give to Tommy. Evie often asked her mother to have a new baby so that she could look after it, and in the meantime, she had become the occasional nursemaid for most of the mothers on the opposite side of the street. Evie was doing up Isabel�
�s braid for the third time in the course of three fleeting days of motherhood, “and now you’ve got to go to school and I’ll cook the dinner for my husband,” said Evie, tying a rag round her waist.

  “But you haven’t got a husband,” Isabel cried disconsolately; “you have two children but no husband. No lady has that. Let me be the mother.”

  The doe-eyed Evie showed a surprising forensic turn while she convinced Isabel that it was utterly unsuitable for her to be a mother; but she agreed, with a rather lost and disgruntled expression, to allow a phantom husband to share the honors of householding with her. Isabel insisted on a real husband, and Evie was obliged to hang out the back window and yell, “Little-Sam, I want you.” Her brother argued. Evie yelled, “You must be my husband.” “No,” yelled Little-Sam. Evie turned hastily to Isabel and said sternly, “My husband is at the office; now you must go to school.” Isabel vanquished, picked up her schoolbag, and went to school again while Evie, muttering happily to herself, busied herself over her doll and imaginary housework.

  Jo, halted by the little scene, had let her face of stern rectitude crease grimly to release a smile for “the kiddies,” and then she went in to the flabbergasted Bonnie. Jo stopped a few paces from Bonnie, who was sitting on her bed, and said sternly,

  “Well, I heard a nice thing on Friday! What are you and that man Holloway doing going about together and in broad day all over Baltimore; and in a barroom too. I can’t imagine you doing such a thing! You’ll stop it at once, that’s all. I’m not going to have my name ruined, if you don’t care about yours.”

  “Mind your own business,” said Bonnie flushing and springing up. On the bed were scattered collars, letters, and paper patterns.

  Jo seemed surprised by this resistance. “What do you mean? It is my business. Do you know what you’re doing? You’re going out with a man with a legal wife; you know what that means?”

  “Go and put your head in a bag,” said Bonnie. “If I like to have an innocent friendship with a married man, it’s none of your affair.”

  Jo burst out that there was no innocence with a married man and what was Bonnie coming to? Did she know where the primrose path was leading her and that being seen all over the place with a married man and drinking spirits in bars didn’t look like innocence; and that she should think of her brothers and sisters if not of herself, and of what Henny’s friends would think if they knew that that was Sam’s sister running round the streets openly and brazenly with a married man? What did she think she looked like?

  “A sight for sore eyes,” said Bonnie.

  “What?” shouted Jo. “Such brazenness!”

  “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” Bonnie told her, curling her lip. This was too much for Jo who rushed up and, shaking her by the shoulders, in a great passion, cried that she must write a letter at once, this very afternoon, in fact now (“Now, if not sooner,” said Bonnie coolly) to the Horror and tell him that he would never see her again.

  “His positively final appearance on all stages,” said Bonnie, pettishly, which showed Jo that she was losing her temper (it never held very long).

  “Stop acting the goat,” cried Jo, therefore, “and think of the way he’s treating you; what can he think of you?”

  “He understands me,” said Bonnie. “I’m naturally vivacious and though I love Sam’s kiddies, I must have friends of my own: and he’s a real gentleman besides.”

  “Fiddlesticks!” said Jo, “you behave like a child. Now sit down and write the man a letter and I’ll post it myself. Sam agrees with me that it has got to stop.”

  “Anyone would think I was pickled in crime,” Bonnie complained; “he’s sweet on me and he’s separated from his wife and he’s going to get a divorce.”

  “I know for certain she won’t divorce him,” said Jo.

  “He told me she would, she hates him and they’re unhappy and they wanted to separate a long time ago, but he just jogged along till he met me, that’s what he said.”

  But Jo told her to never mind, she knew all about it and she told Bonnie that far from hating his wife, he was now living with her again—everyone knew it; there had been a reconciliation, and so forth, and that the horrible man simply went, straight from giving Bonnie a good time, to his wife’s table and that everyone was talking and that there would be a frightful scandal and she, Bonnie, might be the cause of another separation: “Whom God hath joined let no man put asunder,” said Jo, solemnly.

  Bonnie began to cry. “I didn’t know, I can’t believe it; he said to me, ‘Why should we wait forever on a woman’s whim?’ That’s what he said; can you blame me?”

  “You let the cat out of the bag that time, didn’t you?” asked Jo; and the end of it was that she forced Bonnie to write the letter then and there and, after reading it severely, she carried it downstairs with the intention of posting it.

  Bonnie stayed upstairs sobbing, thinking she had a broken heart, until she heard soft things like the hands of ghosts rubbing her counterpane and soft ghostly feet unsteadily shifting on her rug; and looking up, she saw Evie and Isabel staring at her with immense rabbit eyes. In a little crockery voice, Isabel asked,

  “What are you crying for?” and Evie at once piped up with the same question. Affectionate Bonnie threw her arms round the two little girls and dragged them to her, while she sobbed, “Auntie Jo came and took all the gilt off my gingerbread, that’s why, darlings; there, you lump of sweetness!” (she kissed Evie). “Bless you, kittycat, bless its kind loving heart; there, darling” (she kissed Isabel), “you’re a dear little girl too, never mind about poor Bonnie. I’m a poor lone, lorn crittur, that’s why I’m crying; now don’t you worry about the troubles of grownups, your little lives must be all sunshine, dear; you will have trouble enough when you grow up, because we all do; now, there, there, kiss poor Bonnie again, now, there there, look, look; Evie has a tear in her eye, there, my darling lump,” she ravished Evie’s head with kisses, parting her soft, glossy black hair in a fever of love, “there, let its Bonnie hug it for a minute to make me feel better!” Evie looked up lovingly at Bonnie’s shining hair and periwinkle-blue eyes,

  “You are pretty, Auntie,” she said.

  “Other people think so, too,” said Bonnie nodding, with a faint smile; she was already beginning to see that “all was not lost,” as she put it to herself. She got up and began to collect her bits of paper and lace, trying a collar on one little girl and the other and saying cheerfully, “Fear not: all will be well!” and “Never say die!” and “A merry heart goes all the way,” and “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me!” and “Oh, don’t you look perfectly, mm-mm! now, look in the glass, darlin’,” until she was as chipper as a canary; and, bundling everything suddenly into the drawer, she pushed them out, “Now go and play, you two young puppies,” and ran downstairs, humming a tune and determined to be “the gayest of the gay,” to show them she “was not broken nor even badly bent.”

  When she got down Sam and Jo were talking confidentially about Jo’s salary, retirement allowance, and an income-tax inquiry. There was some distribution of chocolate going on, and Ernie was hanging on to the bench, drinking in Auntie Jo with his eyes and ears. Jo was full of her summer holidays—she and Miss Critchmar, her other self, would go to Atlantic City, but not for long on account of her worries with her tenants in Lombard Street, Baltimore; and she went on to discuss these troubles again, the new bathroom, the new house she would like to take over on a five-years’ lease, but always envisaging the difficulty of getting responsible people to live in it and a good furnace man. The children lounged or sat and stared at Auntie Jo with admiration. She was a marvel to be able to tell off a bank manager, a landlord, and to own two houses of her own. Auntie Jo was neither a married woman nor an old maid, nor a schoolma’am, she was a landlord.

  “You were wrong, Samuel,” said Jo, “to let that house go in P Street.”

  Sam put up his hand to silence her: he never talked about money or
property before the children, thinking it a vile thing.

  “What rot!” exclaimed Jo. “A man is none the worse for getting rent! You’d be better off today.”

  Louie spoke up, however, “It was my house and Daddy sold it to buy mother her ring and the dining-room suite.”

  “It was not your house,” said Sam sadly to her.

  “You said so,” she answered timidly, “once, one time.”

  “Do you want to live there?”

  “No, there are Negroes living in it. I went to look at it.”

  “You have a house to live in: of what use would it be to you?”

  “I could sell it—if I had it,” she said humbly.

  “What for? What do you want to buy?”

  She was silent: a rage of desire rushed through her, but she couldn’t think of what she wanted to buy; she muttered, “I could buy a boat, I could go sailing.”

  “We must never think about money or of owning things,” said Sam kindly, bending a rather dewy eye on her. “Greed, the desire to possess, money, the currency of greed, is the root of all evil, it is the means of devouring others, and the lives of others: you know how I feel about that.” Silently Louie took her place beside Ernie, while Auntie Jo, with a beaming eye, smiled on them both, saying, “That is not for you little ones yet awhile: let us work and worry for you; you play and learn.”

  Ernie smiled faintly between his hands and looked at father and aunt with deep appreciation. His father earned $666 monthly, his aunt $200 monthly or more. His aunt got rent out of families in two houses, each with three stories and basement, and his father, though no longer a landlord, would make extra expenses going abroad on this expedition. His father was thirty-eight years old, though, while Auntie Jo was, as near as he could make out, at least forty-eight. But again, she was head of the kindergarten department, much in the same relative position as her brother, who was head of his department, and even a kind of superhead invented for himself alone. Auntie Jo had no car, but was saving the money to go to England and see the seat of the Calverts, even though they were Catholics, and the cathedrals of England. Who would manage her houses while she was away? he pondered. If she put it off long enough he would like to reside there and look after the tenants. On the other hand, his grandfather, Old David Collyer, would be more likely to give him a better job.