The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  “Have you no other shoes?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Clare brightly.

  “Why not?”

  “No money, ma’am!”

  “Don’t call me ‘ma’am,’ Clare.”

  “No, ma’am—Miss—ma’am—Miss …”

  Miss Harney shrugged, “I am going to send to get you a pair of shoes.”

  “No need, ma’am: no need at all, thankee kindly.”

  “Stop acting the fool, Clare.”

  “No’m, yes’m thankee’m.”

  Miss Harney, very tall, spare, spectacled, with iron-gray hair, struggled with a smile, “Clare, you don’t have to go through this, surely? I’ll write to your aunt. You have friends here: we’ll gladly help you.”

  “Don’t want any help: no’m,” Clare said.

  Soon the school was talking about it and saying the teachers had got together and bought Clare a blouse, skirt, and so forth, and that the very next day, out of pride, no doubt, Clare had come back in the former sordid outfit—but this protest did not last. She wore the better clothes, and during the winter Miss Harney looked after her constantly, for Clare had developed a bad cough. She parodied the cough too, of course: it was a great source of inspiration to her. Just before they broke up for Christmas, Clare tied the draw cord of the Venetian blind round her neck and accidentally fell out of the window.

  When examination results were posted, Clare appeared in most lists at the top or as runner-up. Most often she would be “sick” the day before a test, or her aunt would be sick the week before a term examination. On the morning of the examination, Clare would turn up, ragged, but with a clean blouse and cheerful as ever. She would throw balls of paper about the room, write hard, begin early, and end late. Louie, meanwhile, spent so much time pouring out her energies for the love of Miss Aiden that though she worked like everyone else, her results were mediocre. But in Aiden’s subjects, naturally, she was unequaled. The class went into examination on all literary subjects with great sang-froid, and it never entered anyone’s head to try to compete with the great lover. The staff room made serious complaints: Louie worked only for one teacher, and her example set up little frenzies in the rest of the school amongst the younger girls: there were numerous cults now, and some of them had developed into secret societies. At first Louie had founded, with Leana, a secret society, wearing white ribbons with gold letters, SSAA (Secret Society for the Adoration of Aiden), but the inactive members eventually fell away. Parents complained about the plague of secrecy and suspected their children of dark schemes and evil thoughts. In a few weeks, all secret societies were suppressed, by the principal’s order: one or two of them rebelliously stuck it out for a day or two, but these withered away under public ridicule and suspicion. When the story of Louie’s Aiden Cycle became public, there then began a fashion in original poetry so that pathetic pallid serious-eyed girls would be seen sitting in classrooms and corners of the ground scribbling; and some would timidly send their efforts to Louie for criticism. Needless to say, the ferment round Miss Aiden irritated all the rest of the staff. Miss Aiden was admonished by all the older teachers and told that she must discourage her admirers. But who could? What teacher can discourage popularity? It was asking too much of her.

  Sam (after the secret societies were beaten) displayed the greatest interest in Louie’s friends and in Miss Aiden. In the noisy morning of some Sunday-Funday, he would always send one of the children flying inside to ask Louie,

  “How are Aidoneus’ bunions this morning?” or, “Daddy said to ask you does she Miss Aidin’ Franco?” or, “Daddy said, Do you love him better than Miss Aiden?” and he begged Louie every day to bring home to Spa House, Claribella, or Clarior-e-tenebris, as he variously called her. Clare would meet Louie at the joining of Compromise and Duke of Gloucester Streets, and they would walk all round Annapolis; Clare would then cross the bridge with her again, even to the Eastport side, and from the middle of the bridge they would stand and look at Spa House while Louie pointed out its parts and named the Pollits who happened to be in sight. But beyond that, Clare would never go. Sam knew this was only a little girl’s timidity, and sent loving messages to Clare, “Tell Clarigold from Little Sam-the-Bold that she gotta come the next Saturnday that is and paint the porch,” and, “Tell Clarior-e-tenebris to come en wun woun [run round] the Wishing Tree.” (Sam had planted a new Wishing Tree on the lawn in front of the house to attract the small fry of Eastport Village.)

  All through the winter months, on any bright day after school, or after dinner, Sam and one of his children would be seen patrolling the dirt roads of Eastport, rowing up and down the creek, or taking long walks around Annapolis. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, when the jobs round the house were done, they would sometimes take the train to Severnside, or even as far as Jones and beat around the hills, studying the birds, insects, and trees, if the roads and tracks were passable, getting up great roses in the children’s cheeks and freezing their fingers and toes. Every Sunday, though, Sam and Louie alone walked out to free Louie from the house and to walk off her fat. She was by this time a mere barrel of lard, as everyone said; and nothing was more clownish on earth than Louisa with her “spiny gray eyes, long ass’s face, lip of a motherless foal, mountainous body, sullen scowl, and silly smile” (as Henny remarked), going into ecstasies over Miss Aiden and forever scribbling about love.

  “What is going on in your head, all this time, besides this foolishness?” Sam would often ask, in kind gravity. “You must be thinking about things too?” Louie would be silent, trying to recall anything she thought about besides Miss Aiden.

  “You do think about things, as I have taught and shown you, Looloo-dirl?”

  “Yes, of course,” she would mutter, flustered.

  “When you are ready, you will show me your thoughts,” Sam would conclude, not wishing to annoy her. When he got away from the children where his weakness for playground leadership forced him to cavort and fool, he was as kind as he could possibly be; and he would explain this to Louisa,

  “Naturally, I am thinking much about you, Looloo, but I am not saying anything; I know this is a phase and it will pass over; it belongs to your age and a little later on you will get out of it and you will laugh at yourself, I suppose—we all do.” (How darkly the girl flushed! Certainly things passed in her mind that he was unaware of: he had himself well in hand, though, and left her to her own devices.) After a pause he would say, dubiously, “I can trust you, Looloo: I know I can trust my own girl; you will soon be a woman, and I know you will be very close to me; for although you tend to be mean now, you will improve—you have some of your dear mother’s traits.”

  One Saturday in early April they went for a quiet walk along the back grass-grown streets and bays of rotting hulls, Sam hailing everyone they met (he knew most of Eastport by name), jollying the pickaninnies when they came to the daylight-pierced, damp-rotted shacks where the Negroes live—shells of verminous woods, with shrunken seams, afloat on the marsh and horrider than Coleridge’s death ship, A. Gordon Pym’s carrion hulk. These places, as all Eastport, are repugnant to the refined citizens of Annapolis, sure enough; but with the houses they condemn the population. Sam, burning with shame, had already sent in three memorials and was preparing a pamphlet, “Eastport Squalor: A Backwater of the Chesapeake,” which his friend Saul Pilgrim would publish on his little press and sell. (If he was kicked feloniously out of the Department of Commerce, said Sam, it would be but one of Fate’s little tricks, for the country at large would gain in other ways: his energies no longer being at the service of official business, he would seize the crying question of the moment, publicize it and regiment men’s minds and the sympathies of the public-spirited. “I begin at home,” said Sam, referring to his pamphlet.

  Presently they came back from the mud-sunk cove, after interchanging a few words with the Ryatt boys, who were patching up and painting an old fore-and-aft coffin with a motor, which they had renamed “Our Dimes,” and after
saying hullo to the shopkeepers at the three corners and to “Coffin” (James) Lomasne, they turned to the Eastport Bridge, laughing at his scurrility. Jim Lomasne was a derelict of the Florida boom, native of Connecticut, who, working his way north after the collapse, had never got farther than Eastport. He had sold coffins and rowboats on all the dead-and-alive waterways and in all the bankrupt resorts of the coast. The coffins were for Negro and poor-white funerals; they were worth ten dollars at the outside, while Lomasne (as he shamelessly told all and sundry) sold them for seventy dollars and had laid up a nice piece of change for himself. His boat business was slow, and he was now offering to sell the land on which his rickety boat shed stood, as well as his coffin-cum-boat business to the first comer. He also tried to interest speculators in the lucrative or coffin side; but, as Sam peaceably observed, not even a Johns Hopkins fanatic collecting peculiarly loathsome antediluvian growths, or a syphilographer, would touch “Coffin” Lomasne with a forty-foot pole. He had two legs, but clearly he crawled on them; he had a backbone, but it was pliant as a willow wand; he had clothes and they were as clean as any boat-builder’s on the shore, but these clothes were looser than grave-clothes, had a moral not a corporeal stench quite sensible to the nose, and though “Coffin” Lomasne did not lack flesh, through his long immersion in marshy places and abandoned, despised sumps, it clung to his bones like grave wax. You looked at Lomasne and saw an obsequious, fifty-year-old dead beat and, as soon as your back was turned, you felt certain that there stood a loathsome ghoul. But it amused Sam to chat with this mud turtle, and, still chanting and improvising on the immoral perfection of “Coffin,” they crossed the bridge.

  The afternoon had clouded after a still, warm blue day; the water was halfway down, and contained jellyfish. They paused and looked down to count them.

  “They are early,” said Sam. “What is it, Looloo? See if you know.”

  She hesitated and flushed, then said, “Dactylometra?”

  “Dactylometra quinquecirrha, in the Chrysaora stage, thirty-two marginal lappets; you only get the forty-eight lappets and forty tentacles in the regions of greater salinity. You know, Looloo, I think we should begin to keep a salinity record of our poor little crick! Why shouldn’t you turn out the Spa House Journal, or Natural History of Spa House, like Selborne, and you can put in the human beasts, too, what inhabit the area, or human ecology.” He laughed into her face, with his sorcery: “Loo, you and me is going places, but good places. Now, take this: as far as I know, this yer form hasn’t been recorded at this time of year: and in my humble opinion it presages an abnormal run in the bay. We will see. The daughter of a friend of mine has a job measuring the height of water in the Shenandoah—heow would you like a jeob like that, Lazybone?”

  “All right!”

  Sam laughed. The water was almost smooth, with long splinter-shaped ripples, and the long, delicate shells of rowboats stood obliquely along the near jetties, which were mere sticks and runways. Two handsome steam yachts were anchored in close, and a small two-master with a schooner prow. Over the low houses and bare trees rose the bell dome of Bancroft Hall. Everything was ships, shipping, and the sea. On the left hand were the shore houses (of which Spa House was one), grassy dead ends, and tree-topped bluffs around the little pooling creek.

  “Lovely,” said Sam sniffing, “lovely; came the northeast monsoon perhaps—but it blew this little Malay into a quiet harbor. Despite the troubles that, you know so well, Looloo, have cast shadows on a life that was meant to be all sunshine, we will do well here.”

  They went along towards the Market Space and then Sam swerved left.

  “Why are you going here?” asked Louie suddenly.

  Sam smiled, “Hesk no kvastions en I tal no lies.”

  “You’re going to Clare’s place,” she said in fright. Sam smiled,

  “I am a-follerin’ my nose, and you is a-follerin’ your poor little Sam.”

  Louie wrenched his hand, “No, Dad, don’t go there: she doesn’t want us to, they’re too poor. She doesn’t want us to go.”

  “Poverty isn’t a disgrace,” Sam remonstrated, “I’m surprised atcha, Looloo-dirl. I hope Clare isn’t as stupid as that.”

  She dragged at his arm in a frenzy, “Dad, please don’t go.” She had gone scarlet, “Please don’t.”

  He flew into a temper and grumbled, “Of all the stoopids I ever met; now her father can’t see her best friend. I want to get to know your Claribella. I’m sure she’s a good girl, and when you told me she was orphaned twice, and was such a good kid, she’s the right girl for Looloo to know and git some foolish notions out of her head.”

  Louisa sulked. When they came to the weather-gray cabin, Sam went in the little picket gate and knocked at the side of the open door. Louie, waiting on the street, saw Clare’s shape in the dark hallway and then Clare, standing oafishly in the doorway, taking in the scene. She was barefooted, and wore only a ragged sweater and skirt; her arms, bare to the shoulder, were covered with suds.

  “I’m Louie’s father,” explained Sam, pleasantly, “and Louie talked my two ears flat about you, so I thought I’d come along and take you out for an ice-cream soda.” Clare seemed pleased, stood considering, gave Louie a glance, and then with a bound, declared that she would come with them, but they must wait till she got into her bonnet and shawl. It was hideous, thought Louie. She did not wish to share Clare with her father. Sam, on the other hand, glowed with paternity; here he was, not only hands, ears, eyes, wisdom, and virtue for his little daughter (being buffeted too hard by the northeast monsoon), but he was friends and friendship too, ice-cream sodas and Saturday afternoons. There was nothing he would not do for Louie to bring their two worlds together.

  “I like your Clare,” said Sam. Louie perseveringly skinned her shoe on the curb.

  They went up Main Street and into an Italian ice-cream parlor and restaurant. Sam was very jolly, calling the waiter “yon devious devil-may-care Dago,” sotto voce, and saying all he could to make Clare giggle. When the ice creams came and they were sucking at them, he became serious and asked Clare what she would do for a living. “My living will be paying the rent,” said Clare. Sam said that he did not know what Looloo (at this name Clare opened her eyes and then smiled secretly) would do, “because she was at time of writin’ a heap of muddleheadedness, but it would parse over, no doubt.” The two girls looked at each other over their sodas and giggled. Sam smiled, too, at their bent heads and was encouraged to say that “at the momuent Looloo thought of nothin’ but eating of all the dickshunaries she could find and went around chock-full of big words aspewin’ em out and destroyin’ the peas of mind of the famerlee.” Clare stuck to her soda but began to gulp dangerously. Sam approved of this enthusiasm and declared that Louie “went in for Christian martyrdom on a much larger scale than them aneshunt Dagos (by which I mean no more nor less than the Roman-arounds), and I really believe thet thet Jo Bunyan what made Uncle Dan wear shoes two sighs too big was the maggit what had got into Louie’s brain.” At this Louie left off laughing and looked thunder at the happy Sam. Clare went on tee-heeing to herself over the soda.

  “I’m telling you, Clare,” said Sam, genteelly, leaving off his Artemus Ward imitation for a moment, “because I know you’re Looloo’s best friend and maybe you can talk some reason into her skull: though I doubt it.” He grinned and slewed his bright blue eyes towards Louisa, expecting her to be full of his fun. He was surprised to see she was not. He began a sprightly inquisition, looking quickly from one to the other, asking, How was Aidoneus, and, Did Clare adore old Aiden the way Looloo did, and, Did Clare think Old Aido was a good woman as well as an allfired beauty, “for beauty lives with kindness,” and it was impossible to get anything out of the lyrical Loo but moonlight and roses.

  “Do you like her, Clarior-e-tenebris?” he inquired, solicitously, “because I’ll take your word for it: I can see you’re as quick on the trigger as I am myself.”

  “She’s a good scout,” said Clar
e.

  “She’s a good scout, that’s fine: that’s wery satisfactory, wery with a wee: though who is she scoutin’ for, that’s the question?”

  The conversation lapsed. Sam, after a hesitation, invited Clare to have another soda, which she eventually accepted and then Louie too had another. This uncommon blowout delighted Louie; she loved her father at present: and when he began to speak again, in that low, humming, cello voice and with that tender, loving face he had when beginning one of his paeans or dirges, she listened as well as Clare.