Ten North Frederick

by John O'Hara

  “I’ll get you to look for me,” said Joe.

  “So,” said Conrad. “Choe, you notice my English getting better?”

  “Much better. You still have some trouble with some letters.”

  Conrad nodded. “I seen one of those comedian fellows on the stage. You don’t remember, Choe. A long time ago, long long time. You sait I sounted like a comedian on the stage. Don’t go to Philly, they’ll laugh at you there. Stay in Gippswille. You had right.”

  “You were right,” said Joe, correcting him.

  “Thank you. I’m better off in Gippswille. Some laugh, but not many. And some wouldn’t laugh so much if they see my pankpook.”

  “That’s the way to talk, Conrad,” said Joe.

  “Who do I thank? You, Choe,” said Conrad.

  • • •

  The Children’s Era; the Year We Bought the Farm. The one as fixed as the other, but the second had a date on it—1920—and the other was only a period of family life that began on some obscure date and was never given a title, and would never have been called by so intellectual a word as era, by two such conventionally un-intellectual persons as Edith and Joe. They were not aware that they were living in an Age; a Jazz Age, or an Age of Lost Innocence; they took some pride in living in the Twentieth Century, and a little later they were gratified that they were living in the Harding Administration and normalcy after those long years with the sick professor and wars and rumors of wars. They drank of the dwindling supplies of wine at the dinners of The Second Thursdays; there was a very, very different kind of music at the country-club dances; the older sons of their friends wore tuxedos, not tailcoats, to the Assemblies; it was becoming a custom to give the daughter a roadster when she graduated from college; members of the Gibbsville Club were requested not to stand near the windows with highballs in their hands, where they could be seen by passersby on Lantenengo Street; the very spot where Charlotte Chapin had had her unfortunate encounter with a mule-skinner was now a hangout for a group of youngish men, whose Broadway look was as new to Gibbsville as the enterprises which paid for their flashy clothes; at ladies’ bridge parties the cigarette was now out in the open, and parents were now promising their daughters, not alone their sons, rewards for abstaining from smoking; the sanitary napkin was being advertised as a discovery of Army nurses in France; Jack Woodruff, fourteen, made a legitimate, attested hole-in-one on the short seventh at the country club, thus becoming the first member to do so; Miss Holton’s School opened its new building at 20th and Lantenengo Streets; Gibbsville Country Day School announced plans to remove from its building at 16th and Christiana to a new location at 22nd and Christiana; the boys’ secretary of the Y.M.C.A. was discharged for homosexual acts; the upstairs girl employed by the Ogden family gave premature birth to a baby, which she buried in the Ogdens’ cellar; coal gas took the lives of a family of eight on North Railway Avenue; Norman Stokes, a cousin of Edith Chapin, entered the sophomore class at the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University; a shocking case of adolescent prostitution was being tried one day when Joe Chapin dropped in Number 3 Courtroom to kill some time. There were so many articles in the press, so many tidbits in polite conversation, so many items of gossip, that a bachelor could hear without more than passing interest, but which to the father of a small daughter and a small son were threats and promises. A man could envy the accomplishment of one man’s son; he could thank God for protecting him from the sorrow of another man. A parent is sweepingly protective of his infant’s existence; but after the baby days are over, the threats become single threats, calling for defensive measures singly, a measure to a threat; vigilance and defensiveness always, but each threat of harm dealt with individually. And, of course, each hope to be dreamed and planned over by itself. In the beginning years the father’s fears are for bugs, and the less visible the worse the fear, but not much can be done about them. In the later years the bugs are still there, but now the enemy is people, and some of them no more visible than the most dangerous bugs, and as little to be done about them. But of course there are the good and the kind and the loving among the people, the serenely good, the impetuously kind, the continually loving, who trust their own goodness and kindness and loving without suspicious questioning or ultimately contemptuous analysis, or denying the positive, glorifying the evil, marketing the poison, or trading nothing for something, the gag for the joke, the sneer for the laugh, the fancy lie for the plain truth, the ophidian devious for the classic simple. But of course of the good, the kind, the loving, there are exactly too few, exactly, and among them are traitors as well as converts.

  • • •

  The enormous four-year-age difference between Ann and Joby was responsible for her adopting the position of third parent, a position she took as soon as her first early worries were over, her confidence regained, with the knowledge that her infant brother was not to supplant her in parental affections. At Ventnor she would keep an eye on him when he played near the ocean. In the stable at 10 North Frederick she protected him from the Shetland’s kicks, and in the kitchen she took matches away from him. She would try to reason with him in the ponderously adult fashion of young child with younger child. “Matches are bad, Joby. Bad, do you hear? You mustn’t touch matches, ever. Do you hear? You could set the whole house on fire with just one match. So don’t ever let me see you stealing matches again, or I’ll slap you within an inch of your life.” Or, in other circumstances: “Joby, you were a very good boy to help Marian, a very good boy. Always try to help Marian with the laundry basket, and you’ll grow up to be big and strong, like Harry and Father. Let me feel your muscle. Oh, that’s a big muscle, hard as a rock, Joby. Oh, I wouldn’t want to get in a fight with you when you grow up.”

  The east-side location of 10 North Frederick had disadvantages for the children of the Chapins. They had no suitable friends on the East Side, and arrangements had to be made for playmates; Joby or Ann would have to go to a friend’s house on the West Side, or the friend would have to be brought to 10 North Frederick. There was little fraternizing with the children of the Chapins’ neighbors. The Chapin children had not been fortunate in their selection of neighboring playmates. A William Street friend of Ann’s, when Ann was not yet six years old, created a painful situation by her purloining of a dozen silver teaspoons, spoon by spoon. The child was acting under orders from her mother, and so admitted when questioned by Harry and Marian. Then when Harry went to the child’s home to retrieve the silverware, the mother threatened to sue Harry and the Chapins, until Harry said, “All right, then, I’ll go get the constable and we’ll see who sues who.” And Ann lost a friend.

  Joby had no friend so close. On East Christiana Street, around the corner from 10 North Frederick, there was a hose company, which contained a steamer and a hose cart and five horses, three for the steamer, two for the hose cart. It was a unit of the Gibbsville Volunteer Fire Department, of which each company had a paid hostler who usually lived in the building. The Nonpareil Hose Company Number 2 was the most attractive institution in the neighborhood for the small boys who would stand in the doorway and gaze at the fire engines. The boys were not allowed to set foot inside the house; Bart James, the hostler, terrified the boys with his threats. Every harness-snap was in perfect condition, the brightwork was unmarred by a single fingerprint from fire to fire, and he hated all small boys. To Bart James there were no individual small boys, and he did not know Joby Chapin from any other neighborhood brat. As a result of Bart’s ignorance, Joby was “arrested.”

  One boy, not Joby, could no longer resist the temptation to ring the hose-cart bell. He waited until Bart was back in the hose-house stable and sneaked in and pulled the leather lanyard, which brought Bart from the stable. The boys who had been watching the adventurous one ran, all but Joby, who waited. Bart seized him, held him by the arm while he kicked the boy’s bottom and pushed him. “You’re arrested, you little bastard,” said Bart. “I’m coming to your ho
use tonight and take you to jail, and the rats’ll eat your nose off.”

  Again it was Harry who represented the family. “You know whose little ass you kicked this afternoon?” said Harry.

  Bart guessed. “Jesus Christ! The Chapin kid?”

  “Yes,” said Harry. “What happened?”

  Bart told him.

  “Well, you kicked the wrong ass. Hereafter don’t be so free with your boots.”

  “What’s Chapin gonna do?” said Bart.

  “What he oughta do is come over and kick your ass. That’s what I feel like doing.”

  “I didn’t know it was his kid.”

  “Any kid, Chapin kid or I don’t care who. You’re a cranky old bully.”

  “What’s he gonna do, Harry?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” said Harry. “You’ll find out.”

  The implied threats were Harry’s invention; he had been sent to investigate and if necessary to convey Joe’s apologies for Joby’s mischief; but Harry had his own way of dealing with people, especially those he knew better than Joe did.

  The next day, entirely on her own, and in a gesture which she never revealed to a living soul, Ann paid a call on Bart James.

  “Are you the man that kicked my brother?” she said.

  “Who are you?” said Bart James.

  “Ann Chapin. Did you kick my brother?”

  “What if I did?”

  “This is what if I did,” she said, and kicked his shin. “You terrible man.” She turned and ran home and went to her room and closed the door. No one came to punish her for striking a grown person, and the next time she had to pass the hose company Bart James smiled at her and tipped his hat, but she did not return his smile. Bart James died long before she was able to understand why he smiled.

  On the farm, during their first summer, Ann and Joby were together oftener and for longer periods than they ever had been before. Her parents and the servants always seemed to be trying to find something that was in another closet, another bureau, or left at home. “Oh, yes, I remember now, I didn’t bring that,” her mother would say, Marian would say, Harry would say, her father would say. Or, “I know I packed that, so it must be here somewhere.” Her father bought a light Ford truck for the farm, a vehicle with a top and curtains on the side, with removable benches that ran along the sides, and a step beneath the tailboard. Ann called it the ice-wagon. The ice-wagon was more fun than the Pierce-Arrow or the Dodge roadster that her father and mother used more frequently. A trip to Swedish Haven in the ice-wagon became an adventure, climaxed with an ice cream soda at Frantz’s. During the whole summer Ann went to Gibbsville only once, so that the dentist could decide on when to start bracing her teeth. The sojourn in the country was more than half over before her parents had overnight guests, and the guests were not new faces, but they brought boxes of Page & Shaw’s chocolate bonbons, Huyler’s peppermints, watermelons, picture books, cap pistols, and bats and balls, racquets and balls, and dolls that Ann no longer wanted, and that Joby was beginning to do without. The grown-up guests and their gifts, and the trips to Swedish Haven were welcome interruptions of the life on the farm, but they were not more than interruptions; they were not part of the life. Ann’s father and mother would go off to play golf at the new club, even, sometimes, on Sundays. On other days her father would have to go to Gibbsville for the day, and on days when there was no golf her mother would be occupied with those household duties that kept her busy: ordering the meals, planning the marketing, seeing about the new curtains, looking for her work-basket, taking a bath, lying down for a few minutes’ rest, telephoning somebody, talking to the rug salesman, spending the day with the dressmaker, writing a letter, having a glass of ginger ale. One or the other of the things her mother was always having to do, half of them requiring her speaking to Marian, speaking to Harry, speaking to Margaret, speaking to the farmer.

  “Margaret, you have it soft,” Ann heard Marian saying to Joby’s nurse.

  “What if I do?” said Margaret. “I got the responsibility.”

  But even the responsibility was more than shared by Ann. Margaret would take her Father Lasance’s Prayer Book and her beads and her copy of the Catholic Standard & Times and sit in the shade of an apple tree, gently fanning herself with a palm fan (compliments: Frantz’s Confectionery and Ice Cream Parlor, Swedish Haven, Pa.), and sipping elegantly from the tall glass of spiced iced tea. She never read her prayer book or her Standard & Times for more than five minutes at a stretch; it was too hard to concentrate in the heat; the boy was out of your sight before you knew it; there were always so many distracting things going on on a farm. And there was this tendency to doze off. Margaret could not swim, a fact of which Ann was aware, although Margaret claimed the ability when being hired for the job. She had been hired to be a child’s nurse in Gibbsville, in a house on North Frederick Street, and swimming had not seemed likely to be an accomplishment she would have to prove, therefore nothing to stand in the way of a good job. Shortly after their arrival at the farm Margaret had a talk with Ann, in which she disclosed to Ann that she was not as good a swimmer as she had once been, and anyway was more accustomed to the ocean than to fresh water. Ann therefore was to be Margaret’s helper when Joby was anywhere near the dam.

  “Don’t worry, Margaret. Joby can swim,” said Ann.

  “But I can’t!” said Margaret, before the truth could be stopped. “I mean, I can’t swim in that dam.”

  “Oh, pidge-podge,” said Ann. “You can’t swim at all. If you fell in the dam you’d drownd.”

  The bribe that Margaret had been considering was now forgotten. Instead Ann was in the powerful position of being able to threaten to tell her mother on Margaret, and whenever Margaret began to lose patience with Ann, Ann would say: “Swim, Margaret. Swim.” It nullified Margaret as a restriction on Ann’s freedom. But Ann in her capacity of third parent was no less conscientious for her secret knowledge. It was just as well. Joby needed someone.

  • • •

  Rose White McHenry did not share Edith’s opinion of Martha’s Vineyard and the long-nosed residents of West Chop. Far from sharing it; she did not even know of it, and since the White family house on Edgartown had passed on to Rose through inheritance, Edgartown was where Rose and Arthur passed their summers.

  Edith tried to resist the McHenrys’ annual invitation to spend a week at Edgartown. In other years she might have been successful, since the McHenrys—Rose and Arthur, not Mildred and Arthur—had not visited the Chapins in Ventnor.

  “Can’t we get out of going to Martha’s Vineyard?” said Edith. “We can tell them we’re so busy with the farm.”

  “They’ve been here, they can see we’re not really as busy as all that,” said Joe.

  “Rose didn’t visit us in Ventnor last summer. Not that I was heartbroken,” said Edith. “We visited them, but she didn’t repay the visit.”

  “Well, next year we won’t go to Edgartown, but this year we almost have to. In fact, we have to.”

  “Will you please tell me why?”

  “Politeness—but it also suits my purpose.”

  “What purpose?”

  “Well, I have to be in Philadelphia next week and again in two weeks. I can arrange our plans so that I can see my man on the way to Edgartown and on the way home, and in between we can visit Rose and Arthur. What’s the difference, Edith? You can go bathing and sailing, you don’t have to see those Boston people.”

  “No, of course not. Just every night at dinner, old men asking me what class you were, and what relation are you to the Something-Something Chapins.”

  “Wrong college, wrong Chapins. Oh, I’ve gone through it oftener than you have, don’t forget. Once more, this one summer?”

  “I’m not going to let you forget that promise.”

  Edith dutifully spent the week on the Vineyard. On the return trip the
y stopped in Philadelphia. They went to their hotel room and while Edith was taking her bath, Joe telephoned the man with whom he had an appointment. When she came out of the bathroom Joe was sitting on the bed.

  “Let’s go home on the 4:35,” he said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Price broke our appointment. He has to be in Fort Penn all day tomorrow. His secretary said she sent me a telegram, but I didn’t get any telegram. I’m going home.”

  “Well, I’m not,” said Edith. “I have a great deal of shopping to do tomorrow. There’s a sale at Wanamaker’s and this will be my last chance to get a lot of things done for the fall. I want to get two new chairs, and order some carpet, and I’m simply not going to make another trip.”

  “Well, would you mind if I went home on the 4:35?”

  “Frankly, I wouldn’t mind at all,” said Edith. “You insisted on our going to Rose’s and I had a perfectly miserable time, and now you want to change my plans when I could at least get something done.”

  “All right, Edith, all right,” said Joe. “I’ll take the 4:35 and you can come home tomorrow. Will you take the 4:35 tomorrow? I’ll meet you at Swedish Haven.”

  “Yes, I’ll be on the 4:35,” said Edith.

  “Tell me which suitcase you’ll need and I’ll take the others home with me,” said Joe.

  Philadelphia was so much a part of the Gibbsville middle- and upper-class life that when Gibbsvillians saw each other on Chestnut Street, they bowed and smiled, but it was not an occasion for the gladsome encounter that would have taken place on Fifth Avenue, New York. At four o’clock Joe departed for the Reading Terminal, leaving Edith alone and annoyed at what she considered his selfish lack of consideration, whimsically impulsive behavior, failure to appreciate her efforts at the Vineyard, and preference of the children’s company over one more day with her. He had not even stopped to consider that this was the first time in her life that she was left alone in a hotel overnight. Indeed, she was alone in the room for a quarter of an hour before she realized it herself. There was still some time for shopping, not for the major purchases she would make in the morning, but the stores would be open for another hour and she decided to waste no more of it within unfamiliar walls. She closed her door behind her, walked to the elevator, bowing to the white-haired woman at the floor clerk’s desk, and in two minutes she was on Walnut Street and making her way to Chestnut.