The Man Who Loved Children

by Christina Stead

  “All right,” said Henny, “come along: don’t let’s sit here. I’ll buy myself a new hat before I meet anyone: I look like a hundred-year-old hag in this. I’m a bag of bones, he probably won’t know me. No one will recognize me now.”

  They got into Washington in about fifty minutes, but Henny spent a good deal of time feverishly turning over the remnant counters at the Palais Royal and other stores, Henny saying that a spot of shopping would pep her up and give her a bit of color in her cheeks, and “When I feel downright low, I can always get out of it by buying something.” Hassie bought her a cheap new blouse and a hat, so that by lunchtime, when she was to meet Bert Anderson in Maynard’s Ship Bar in Eye Street, she wore a new spotted veil to mask her thinness, and through this her large burning eyes glowed sickly.

  Bert came prancing in exactly as in the old days, at one moment holding out his hands and looking for a place for his hat. “Henny, Henny, hullo! Where have you been?”

  She said, “Hullo, Bert,” thinkingly vaguely that he had the best of all bargains, being still young, strong, and fresh-colored and free.

  They had the bar special, twice, but it did Henny little good. She could see Bert stealing glances at her both inquisitive and surmising.

  “You didn’t spend the winter in Florida at any rate, that’s one good thing, not with the idle sons of riches,” said Bert, rather low. “Are you eating? I got to snatch a quicky, Henny old girl. You’re not staying in Washington with the Great Man? I say, I never sent you a word, it certainly was too bad about”

  “It must have been painful for you,” she said.

  He looked up quickly to catch her laugh. “Yes, yes, I had to go to the ILGWU to have my stitches taken out with laughin’. But you, poor thing; it came hard on you, eh? Been shopping?”

  She muttered feverishly, “Someone sent him a dirty anonymous letter about me and you.”

  Bert’s fork stopped halfway to his mouth, and his great brown eyes opened wide in his face, “Gee,” he said, “Gee, Henny, that ain’t so good! Who could ha’ been the son of a bitch who—gee! You see, Henny, be sure your sin will find you out, as my old schoolteacher used to say when I wrote on the lavatory wall. What did he say?” He dropped his voice.

  “I told him I had thought he prided himself on being above such things; he got hot and holy, and I got so mad I told him to blow his nose in it.” She shrugged, “I’m through with him.”

  “Oh, you can’t do that, you mustn’t do that. The children, dear?”

  “I thought I’d poison him myself, but I thought I might get some money somehow and get away. Why couldn’t I go to the Pryors at Frederick and stay? Why do I have to be chained to him?”

  “Gosh,” said Bert, “I didn’t mean to get you into trouble, Henny. He wasn’t mean to you, didn’t beat you up?” He grinned palely and wiped the smile quickly off his face as he saw her black look. “Poor old Henny, no luck!”

  “Listen,” she said nervously, rushing ahead, “you remember one time, you said you wished I were free; I could use a little friendship now. If I see that man again tonight I’ll go mad, I think: I’m sure to do something desperate.”

  He lifted his eyes slowly from his plate and gave her a long searching look, “Dearest, what do you want me to do?” he asked softly. He slapped his pockets, pretended to pull them inside out, “Money—I haven’t it! A home—I haven’t it! Someone to help you—how can I ask for you, Henny? Gosh, you used to be so rich!” He shook his head slowly, “And I really can’t afford to let anything get about. It’s not you, but it’s my job and Mother—you know what old-fashioned old ladies are?” He nodded sympathetically. “Someone’s got to get you out of this mess, though. I think you’d better go away to Frederick for a bit, don’t you? And not see me—that’s very important; never see me. Jesus, I hope no one—” he looked cautiously around. “Of course, I thought of this a long time ago, Henrietta, long before—” he nodded. “I was afraid, I told you I was afraid. We were too conspicuous. You see, if you were nobody and I wasn’t a Government employee—but placed as we are, we can’t hide under a doormat, can we?” He forced a laugh and looked up from his plate. “The principal thing is, don’t lose your head. You shouldn’t have come here, old girl. Jesus, it might be a trap. Perhaps he followed you.”

  “Oh!” She raised her eyes too from her cup, “Oh! What a life! What a man! Oh, you make me sick! Bert, you’re big as an elephant with the soul of a mouse.”

  He frowned, “Look at it my way! Oh, gee, Henny darling, don’t go on that way; you know how I’m fixed. My mother’s sick, and I’ve been going home straight from work for weeks. Really, I haven’t been making whoopee; I’ve been a good boy, and if Sam started a suit, wouldn’t it finish everything? What good would it do you? You see? You must go right away to Frederick, that’s my advice to you, old girl: let it blow over. If he don’t see you with me, he can’t prove anything. It’s just chitchat. He’ll probably get over it. Have you got any dividends yet?”

  “What about that?”

  “If you do get them, old girl, you can still hold out on him.”

  She laughed, “Let’s have a Scotch and soda, Bert! I haven’t had a good time for so long; and I don’t think you have, either: you’re getting positively moldy.”

  He laughed, rounded his chest, “Well, I suppose I am that: I suppose being the good little boy does settle over me like a sort of mildew. Well, there are plenty of good times to come. I don’t regret treading the straight and narrow for a change. It’s amusing. I get new emotions!”

  “You’ll be whoring when I’m dead,” Henny said bitterly, stirring her glass. “Do you want to take the afternoon off and give me a good time on what might be my last day on earth? Will you do that?” She begged him with her glowing eyes.

  He was embarrassed, “Well, Henny, love, Jesus, I would, you know that—you and me have been really good friends; we got along all right. You understand things; you’re the right cut. But I must go back to work; you don’t want Bert to get demoted or promoted to the Civil Service Commission’s carpet strip, or anything like that?”

  “Bert,” she begged.

  “I wish there was a way out, I wish there was, believe me, Henny,” he said uneasily.

  “Will you meet me this evening then?” she asked, nervously.

  “Well, I oughtn’t to, you know the old girl expects me. No, I don’t think I can, Henny old girl; sorry, really, I’m sorry.”

  She fastened a peculiar look on him, “You do take me for a two-dollar pickup, don’t you? I always suspected there was no difference between me and the street trotters.”

  “Now, Henny,” he said reproachfully.

  “Because I’ve lost my money,” she said to herself: “you know I half thought that this morning. Aren’t you a bit ashamed!”

  “Of what?” he cried.

  “Of not coming with me on my last day on earth,” she cried triumphantly.

  “I don’t understand you; what are you trying to fasten a scene on me for? Is this a setup?”

  She began to light a cigarette, very carefully, with trembling hand, so that he leaned across the table and held it for her, “Poor Henny, poor old girl! Don’t lose control, Henny.”

  “Advice is cheap. You are a bounder, aren’t you?”

  “Jesus, if you knew how I’d like to help you, Henny!”

  “That’s a wonderful end to my love affair,” said Henny, her face blazing yellow; she turned her head aside and hid her eyes in her hand. He heard her whispering, “Oh, God, Oh, God, this is terrible!”

  “Henny darling, you had me, and I had you, and this is no good, it’s over. We can’t go back. I can’t help you. Why, I got you into this mess! See what good I am to you? Be sensible, old girl.”

  “That’s smug.”

  He shrugged, “I am smug, I suppose: I come from the lower bourgeoisie, my dear.”

  Her breast was heaving with her painful breaths. He looked at her quizzically, “What exactly did you come for,
Henrietta? Why did you do such a foolhardy thing? Are you really feeling desperate?”

  “I’m being torn to pieces inside,” she said in a rare contralto voice, looking sternly at him. “I don’t know why I came, I knew you. You’re not bad, but you’re not good either. You’re a loathsome thing! But I knew it. I don’t blame you. At the beginning, that winter day—I nearly fainted when I saw you in your great jumbo BVD’s and now I see you in your moral BVD’s; it all hangs together. Don’t think you’re hurting me. You can’t. I’m beyond all your yellow cowardly tricks. You never saw me again when you heard I was pregnant: when I rang up, even though we had a regular appointment, you threw it in my face that you had another girl to supper; not a letter all that time. You knew my money troubles—did I ask you for a cent?”

  “Steady, there, steady: yes, you did, if the truth must be told. But we were going steady—”

  She bit her lip. Then, after thinking a bit, looking down into her clasped hands, she said quietly, “I used to wait for the telephone to ring: the door wasn’t a door but a living leather thing that might bang to and fro, to let you in. I used to dream at night I heard you coming to see me.”

  “Gee, old girl,” he said collectedly.

  “I wasn’t in love with you, but I wasn’t out of love with you, and I wanted your help. And you weren’t there. I used to look down at all those lights and think, Somewhere under one of those lights Bert is singing some girl his old sweet song; why can’t he take one night off to come and see me? That winter!”

  “Jolly good thing I didn’t! It’s bad enough”

  She looked at him with hate, “I know where it came from: you were boasting round the place that you were sleeping with the wife of a departmental head and putting on his horns while he was away: everyone knew, I could tell by the way they looked at me.”

  “Why didn’t you stop me—or stop yourself?”

  “I can’t go on, Bert; I’ll scream.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said, alertly, getting up and picking up her wrap: “you’re not hysterical. Now, will you go to the movies, and I’ll see you again after work?”

  “I wouldn’t see anything in the movies, but what can I do? I’d rather go shopping, but I have no money.”

  “Well, I haven’t any,” he said rather sharply. Then, sweet again at once, he continued, “You ring me, old dear—or better, you wait for me in the old joint. ‘Say baby, that ain’t a joint, it’s a dump.’ Ha-ha-ha. Say, can you pay for a movie or are you flat, stony broke?”

  She said sullenly, “You’re not going to hand me a dollar on the sidewalk, are you? Go to hell, Bert! I’ll be at the bar maybe.”

  “You’ll be there, old girl, you’ll be there,” he said, apparently in high feather. He kissed her, “There, be a good girl.”

  She wandered round all the afternoon, sitting on public seats and looking in secondhand shops, wandering through the shops disconsolately. She met Hassie at last at the appointed hour and told her she was to meet “her friend” in a certain bar; but at last she told her which bar and Hassie gave her some more money, because she had bought a dress for Evie, enough to pay for a cocktail while she waited. She waited over an hour, with her one cocktail before her, but the door did not swing in that unique breezy way which was Bert. At last it did swing for her, though. In came Hassie, with a set expression, and after sitting beside her five minutes and talking vigorously, she persuaded her to come away. Henny had dark circles under her eyes.

  “I rang too,” she said. “I need another nickel to ring his home to see if an accident happened.”

  “Henny, don’t be a fool.”

  “I can’t believe he would do that, even so.”

  “Come and get a bite to eat at home with me: I’ll ring up Sam and keep you overnight. Then you simply have to go back and face the music. And on Saturday I’ll come down and talk to Sam. You ought to go away. You look done up.”

  She led her out. The broad, middle-aged lady leading the thin, wrecked, rakish one were studied by all the wildly gay Washington couples there, and a very audible ripple of laughter followed them, three girls near the door going into fits of laughter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1 Baby’s bedroom.

  HENNY STAYED TWO DAYS at Hassie’s, not paying much attention to her troubles but reading and sitting round with Hassie or Cathy or the servant, in the dark back room, furnished in oilcloth and dark-smeared pine, reading, tatting, and taking tea or coffee. She sewed up some seams in Cathy’s doll collection and looked into the old trunk of silver from Monocacy which Hassie had taken as her portion. There were two Dresden figures, two shepherdesses, one in black lace and one in white, which Louie had adored from babyhood; and Henny took these in a duster to Hassie, asking if she could have them for the poor kid, who always liked them so much.

  “It is a rotten shame, when I think that the poor kid is dragged into all our rotten messes,” said Henny.

  “I’m sure I don’t want them,” Hassie consented, bustling about in a great blue-striped apron. The saline and slimy smell of the wet cement floor of the fish store came through the back screen door. Henny hated fish and complained about it good-humoredly all the day. Fish was in the curtains, on the oilcloth, in the cooking, said Henny, while Cathy made a face. There was practically nothing the wasp-waisted Cathy would eat because of her delicacy; her father had made a living out of foods made from entrails and offscourings, sausages and the like, and loved tripes and stuffed neck and the parson’s nose; her mother was a sturdy-fishwife, slapping down fish, stacking them in salt, plunging her hand in barrels. Cathy had seen her mother screw a chicken’s neck and could eat no more; she could not eat a rabbit because she had seen it skinned; she could eat nothing but baby lamb chops and was doing her best to move into an esthetic vegetarianism, but the poor thing was too young to have any rights and still had to dive into the family messes. She sat round gratefully with her Auntie Henny who said “fwee” and “pooh” to everything, and listened owlishly to pungent tales of loathsome folk, scabby with leprosy, spineless with caries, both moral and medical, whom Henny and Hassie knew intimately, or met in the street.

  Henny rang up every few hours to ask about Charles-Franklin and find out what the “children’s father” was doing today, and what Louie was giving them for lunch, and whether they stayed up late singing and jigging with the children’s father, or whether they went to bed, and how was Little-Sam’s earache. At night she tossed, and would put on her bedside lamp at all hours of the night while she tried to read popular novels which she called, universally, silly rot, muck, and a lot of hooey. She was really waiting for Sam to come to get her, or for him to send a letter saying he had started divorce proceedings. She did not much care. Her life was such a ruin that she preferred not to think about it at all. But on the third day, she took the train back to Annapolis. It was Saturday. She saw the little ones on the lawn jumping up and down and for all she had to face, her heart beat faster: how odd that this tumble-down windy mansion in which she had to live with a despised man was home! But her heart sank as she came up the drive. The children, seeing that unusual sight, a taxi, serpentining into the drive, ran to it with screams and halloos and started tumbling all over her. She brushed them off, paid the taxi driver, and went in, saying, “Where’s your father?”

  “Oh, the marlin’s coming: Mr. Pilgrim is sending Dad the marlin—they caught a marlin,” Henny heard. “Why did you stay away, Moth? Why did you stay at Aunt Hassie’s, Moth? It’s coming by the ferry: they’re sending it in a car to Matapeake, ooh, we’re going to boil it!” Henny took no notice of this, but with a grim expression on her face went into her room. There she had a great shock: the little fairy daughter of “Coffin” Lomasne was standing at the dressing table prinking before the glass. Henny sank down on the bed, putting her hand over her heart. The little girl turned round guiltily and flushed.

  “Who let you in?”

  She said shyly that Mr. Pollit had let her come in to breakfast
to play with Tommy. Henny sneered and laughed. For weeks, Tommy the boatbuilder had done little but think about Lomasne’s baby girl, and could not understand why she could not come and live with them. Now, thought Henny, no sooner do I turn my back than even Tommy gets in another woman; what a pack men are! And of all little girls it has to be Sam’s “Little-Fairy” Lomasne.

  Sam came up from the tool shed where he had been arranging Ernie’s bottles in a row, preparatory to washing them and stalking into the hall outside Henny’s room said, “I see you’ve come back.”

  Henny was silent, but in a minute walked out of her room softly as a ghost, and passing him with a black look, but a distant pasty one not like her old recriminatory ones, went into the baby’s room. Here she sat down, and Sam, having nothing to say, went outside again and began singing, “Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose true and dare to make it known.”

  Baby Chappy was on the front veranda, playing with his blocks without saying a word. Henny sat in the room he shared with Tommy in the front of the house and looked round. Louie had not yet made the beds: the twisted week-old sheets and battered pillows, the faded flannel pajama suits and ragged bedside mats with sand and loam ground into them, lay about in mild disorder, while the single finger of sun in the far corner sought for them and moved delicately towards the center of the oilcloth. Flies buzzed inside the wire screens on the windows. On Monday all that would have to go into the wash, and Henny had not paid Mrs. Lewis for the last Monday’s wash. Louie came into her with a cup of tea. The room smelled of babies’ dirt and babies’ effluvia. Over Tommy’s bed a great sun-tanned girl with wild curly hair grinned down from a grove of oranges—a poster that Tommy had fallen in love with at the age of one year. Over Charles-Franklin’s bed was the picture that someone had given Henny on her wedding day, a brown man and a white-skinned girl kissing in a field of poppies at sunset, in a gilt rococo frame. Pollit art had never gone beyond this. On each side of the door was a sketch in water colors, one a sunken garden with trees by the Monocacy as it winds through Frederick, and one of the old Chesapeake and Ohio bridge which crosses the Monocacy River, with the low bushy landscape and the stones spouting water. Henny had only learned three things in her school life—watercolor-painting, embroidery, and the playing of Chopin, and her children could not do one of these things. Instead, they were carving boats, painting outhouses, putting in rubble for cement floors. But she did not think about her futile, anemic youth now. Instead, she looked vaguely about, sniffing that familiar smell of fresh dirtiness which belongs to mankind’s extreme youth, a pleasant smell to mothers. Henny had spent twelve years in that atmosphere.