Mrs. Kennedy was very much surprised to see Angelica spring out of bed
the next morning at six o’clock, for she had always liked to lie in bed
till the last possible instant. Her mother was still more surprised to
hear her say:
"I’ll get the breakfast, mommer!"
"You needn’t to, deary. I guess you want a little rest."
"Rest, nothing! I’m going out to hunt for a job this morning."
"But aren’t you ever going back there--to Mrs. Russell’s?"
"Not much! I’m going back to the factory again."
"Oh, Angie! I’m sorry!"
"Why? You made enough row about my going to Mrs. Russell’s."
"Only because I didn’t think you could get the place; but now that you
did, I’d hate to see you go back. I’d like to see you better yourself."
"Oh, for Gawd’s sake! That stuff again! No! Let me tell you, mommer, I’m
through with all that. I’m all right the way I am. I’m good enough--as
good as any of _them_, anyway."
She put on her hat and went out, without a kiss, without a good-by, and
Mrs. Kennedy saw no more of her till six o’clock, when she came in, pale
and scowling.
"What’s the matter with the supper?" she said, roughly. "Why ain’t it
ready?"
"I just got in myself," said Mrs. Kennedy. "I had a hard day."
"Well, you’re not the only one," said Angelica. "What you got?"
"I’ll have to run to the corner."
"Now, see here!" said her child. "I won’t stand this! I’m not going to
wait this way. If you can’t have my supper ready when I get home, I
won’t come home--d’ye understand?"
This was but the first indication of a change, a profound change, in
Angelica. Her mother saw it with anguish. She was rougher, coarser, more
cruel. She was brusque with her mother in a way quite different from her
old, careless fashion. She was cold, critical, scornful.
She had got back her job in the factory where she had worked before, but
she didn’t bring her money home now. Her mother was obliged to ask for
some when she had nothing left to buy what her child demanded; and then,
fiercely reluctant, Angelica would throw down on the table a crumpled
dollar bill.
Her habits were altogether changed. She spent no more evenings with her
mother at home or at the movies. She went about with other factory
girls, to dance-halls and cabarets of the cheapest sort. She bought
herself daring blouses, thin as a veil, through which her lean brown
shoulders shone; she wore short skirts, and had gauzy silk stockings on
her long legs; she painted her face with exaggeration.
"Angie!" her mother remonstrated. "You don’t look _decent_!"
"I don’t want to," she replied.
Night after night she stopped out until one o’clock. Then her mother
would be awakened by voices in the courtyard--a kiss, very likely, a
scuffle, a slap. That was Angelica and her escort, saying good night.
Then she would come in, jaded, irritable, the paint very brilliant on
her pale face, and begin undressing--not in the dark, as she had done
formerly, to avoid disturbing her mother. She would come into the room
with no effort to be quiet, light the gas, and dawdle about, while the
poor anxious woman in bed lay watching her, sometimes asking questions,
but timidly, dreading a rebuff.
"Bah! I’m so sick of it!" Angelica told her one night. "Those cheap
dances--those smart Johnnies mauling you round with their sweaty
hands--and then a glass of beer and a whole lot of their cheap talk.
_Cheap_, all of it! I’m sick of--everything!"
She had flung herself down fully dressed on her cot, her soiled white
shoes on the clean spread.
"Just _sick_!" she repeated, with a break in her voice.
Her mother was moved.
"Maybe it’s because you got used to better sort of people out where you
were," she said.
Angelica raised herself and looked at her.
"_Better!_ Well, maybe they were. I don’t know. Only--I don’t know--I
did get to like having things nice, and hearing nice voices. All this
is kind of a sudden change. And the bunch I go out with--Lord, what a
bunch!"
"Then why do you go out so much, deary? Why don’t you stay home?"
"Oh, for Gawd’s sake, mommer! After working all day, a girl my age can’t
sit home alone all evening."
Alone! The poor woman winced.
"You could read magazines, or get books out of the library."
"I don’t want to read. There’s nothing in books. I want to live. I want
to find out if there’s anything--anywhere."
"What do you mean, deary? If there’s anything anywhere?"
"Oh, it don’t matter! I’m going to bed. Good night!"
They went on in this way for weeks. What misery for the mother! She was
nothing to her child; she could not even serve her. Angelica had become
completely independent. She didn’t want to talk to Mrs. Kennedy, to go
out with her, to stay at home with her.
Moreover, she had grown indifferent to the little niceties about which
she had once been so fastidious. Sometimes she would get in earlier than
her mother. Then, without waiting, she would get some sort of meal for
herself, eaten off the tub tops, from the saucepan in which it was
cooked. She would spend a long time dressing herself in her vivid
finery, leaving the dirty pots for her mother to wash. Then again she
wouldn’t appear until late, long after Mrs. Kennedy had disposed of her
meal.
"We met some of the fellers," she would say; "and we hung around a while
and ate a lot of candy. I don’t want any dinner."
One evening her mother weakly reproached her for her lateness.
"There I had a nice bit of chopped meat fried and ready for you," she
said. "You ought to let me know when you’re not coming in. It’s a
trouble to me and a waste of money to buy things and you not to touch
them."
"Forget it!" said her child. "I’m never in any hurry to get home, I can
tell you. To this hole! Why should I?"
"To see me!" cried her mother in desperation.
"Been seeing you every day for nineteen years. No, mommer, you can’t
keep me hanging round you any more. I got to be free."
"That don’t mean you’re not to be kind and loving to----”
"Well, I’m _not_ kind and loving. Gawd didn’t make me that way."
Her mother grew more and more certain that Angelica had met with some
disaster in her past situation. She thought over it at night when she
lay in bed, in the day while she worked--thought of it with anguish and
terror. Her peasant soul forgot its acquired American sophistication,
and craved that age-old solace nowhere to be found in her present mode
of life--a priest, a pastor, some one in authority to reassure her.
She hadn’t even neighbours to gossip with, as people had in the "old
country." There was no one who had seen her child grow up, who knew all
about her, and could and would discuss her with kindly penetration. A
stranger in a strange land, but--how wretchedly!--a stranger to whom no
country was home. Certainly America was not her heart’s land; certainly
Scotland, the home of her parents, would have seemed wholly alien; while
her husband’s birthplace, to her, was little more than a fantastic
dream-land.
Unto the third generation does this strangeness persist. Angelica
herself had that peculiar lack of ease, that exotic quality; she was an
outsider. Her factory friends, too--they were of every race, and they
had all become alike. Bohemian, Irish, Russian, Italian--they had all
the same air; but it was a foreign air. Their adopted country had
undeniably changed them into something different, but it had not made
them American. It had made them only strangers.