Twenty-two sat down to dinner on a Thanksgiving afternoon at four,
1903, in the House on Sycamore Street.
It might have been the house in Downing Street so far as its
centrifugal significance was ground into the consciousness of the men,
women and children gathered about its board.
For thirty years it had stood on the outskirts of a town that lapped
out toward it like a constantly encroaching tide. It was then virtually
the last house in Centralia. Always had been. As you drove into town,
the two-story wooden structure of tower, ell, bulge and gable, marked
the beginning of the principal residential street. As you left town,
a half mile or so beyond the Schuyler fifteen acres of homestead, a
city-limits sign was painted against a whitewashed slab of stone.
Later, a large sign the shape of an open book announced:
YOU ARE NOW LEAVING CENTRALIA. THIS SPOT MARKS THE SITE WHERE
CELERON DE BIENVILLE IN 1749 PLANTED A LEADEN PLATE AND TOOK FORMAL
POSSESSION.
CENTRALIA OFFERS UNPARALLELED FACTORY AND FOUNDRY SITES AND PEERLESS
WATER POWER ADVANTAGES. SEE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE. WRITE FOR BOOKLET.
Six children and several of the grandchildren had been born in the
House on Sycamore Street. The second-story front, a deep room with a
bay window formed by a tower that was filled with an indoor vine of
myrtle that grew in a flower box, held in its timbers the first squalls
of Mathilda (deceased at two weeks of age), Rebekka, Clara, Henry, Phil
and Emma Schuyler.
Two of Rebekka’s children had been born in that front room. Clara had
come from St. Louis for the purpose of having her first-born see its
first light of day in that room of double walnut wardrobe that reached
to ceiling, hand-painted window shades, washstand with a pink-and-white
bowl and pitcher, toothbrush-mug, and grooved soap-dish that had stood
dry since the cedar closet had been made into a bathroom.
To open your eyes upon that room was to greet the retinas with a pair
of china spittoons on the white hearth; oval portraits of Austrian
Schuylers, in oval brooches or square-cut spades of beard; a pair of
steel-engravings of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Signing the
Declaration”; a horsehair and walnut-backed armchair, in which the Old
Gentleman always sat, and that by its shape was to suggest to Henry
Schuyler, as long as he lived, the figure of his father crouched into
it for his annual cold, a gray-striped blanket across his shoulders,
and his feet immersed in steaming foot tub the shape of a kidney and
with a tin bottom that plunked.
The solemn double bed with pillow shams the pallor and shape of
headstones, was covered with a patchwork quilt of tulip-and-leaf design
that Mathilda Schuyler had brought as dowry to Heinie Schuyler when
she married him in an Austrian village called Holdstein. On holidays
it was piled with the mufflers, the top-coats, the tippets, muffs,
baby-leggings, small-boy sweaters, and the little-girl cloaks of the
homecoming clan.
It was as if the walls of this house, which had been outgrown
practically the first year of its occupancy, would burst its sides for
need of expansion, on that Thanksgiving afternoon, for instance, when
the Schuylers, twenty-two strong, sat down to dinner at four.
That meant that Schuylers from as far as Springfield and as wide as
St. Louis, with their wives, husbands and children, were home for the
holiday.
For two days the rich sweetness of mincemeat stewing in its sluggish
juices had wound aromatically through the house. To even stir the
colloid mass required Mathilda to grasp the long iron spoon as you
would a broom, with both hands, and haul it around and around the pot.
Sometimes Trina, who had come to the Schuylers a slim chip of a hired
girl and, now twenty-five years later, weighed two hundred and forty
pounds, helped. But at the period of this Thanksgiving, Trina was
already entering the last seven years of her life, and varicose veins
had set in, rendering her chair-ridden the greater part of the time.
And so Mathilda, who had weighed ninety pounds when she was married and
now weighed one hundred and one, swung her heavy chores practically
alone, importunings of the Old Gentleman and his children to the
contrary notwithstanding. As a matter of fact, Henry often said of her
that she seemed to take a sort of sadistic pleasure in flaying her
endurance; in pulling her muscles at the dragging of heavy objects
until she could feel the bones of her arms leave their sockets; in
straining the wires of her tough little body at doing the lifting of a
strong man. When Mathilda was forty-eight she was shriveled in the way
that women no longer allow themselves to grow old. But she could carry
a galvanized washtub of hot water or a one-hundred-and-ten pound sheep
across a meadow and glory with fierce, straining eyeballs, as her very
heart seemed to leave its moorings.
There were two hundred and eighty cookies this Thanksgiving, baked by
Mathilda by lamplight before dawn. Pepper drops and cinnamon squares
(especially baked because they were Leslie’s favorites) and aniseed.
The sunshine cake was of a specially-prepared flour, and saccharine
instead of sugar (son-in-law Sam Holly was overweight and obliged to
reduce when his heart began to flutter), which everyone declared,
for purposes of cheering Sam, was even better than if prepared with
Mathilda’s usual and wickedly-rich ingredients. There were candied
yams, candied apples on sticks, sweetbreads in individual ramekins,
turkey dressing of citron, chestnuts and walnut meats. Cranberry sauce
that had jellied the star-shape of the mold. Cider that stung like all
of an autumn outdoors. A pitcher of eggnog with a fine peppering of
cinnamon. Hot biscuit, the size of a silver dollar, that went into the
mouth at one plop (the Old Gentleman smothered his in maple syrup).
Kale boiled with bacon rind. There were six pumpkin and six mince pies
alternating, standing in rows on the pantry sill.
Mathilda naturally alternated them that way. She liked making little
patterns of her days and her quiltings and her procedures.
Rebekka Schuyler Renchler had sent over, from her farm, a gallon pail
of apple-butter, a batch of _zimmtkuchen_ the shape of soldiers, camels,
and stars for the children’s table, and five bushels of winesap apples,
the yield of her own orchards that had come to be known locally as
“Rebekka Wines.”
The Phil Schuylers, as usual, brought down a hamper of Mullane’s Taffy;
Phil’s annual contribution to his father of a quart bottle of Kümmel,
and more cookies, his wife’s specialty. Sugar ones with jam hearts.
There was a story abroad in Centralia that one Thanksgiving, Mathilda
had sent these jam-hearted cookies to Annie Milliken, who in turn,
with a Thanksgiving Day superabundance of her own, had sent them over
to a school-teacher friend who had innocently completed the circle by
sending them around to the Schuylers as a Thanksgiving Day offering.
Be that as it may, the circle of giving in Centralia was anything
but a vicious one. Henry Schuyler used to say, in the dry fashion he
had, that more glasses of jelly changed hands in Centralia during a
holiday-week; more pies and tarts under snowy napkins; more batches of
cookies and mincemeats in Mason jars, than there were stocks bandied
back and forth on a busy day on the New York Stock Exchange.
Centralia loved to bite with careful front teeth down on its neighbors’
cookies, mince them finely until taste squirted along the tongue. And
appraise.
One of Emma’s hazelnut tortes, tried and true to occasions of birthday,
anniversary, and that chilled moment when the newly-bereaved family
returns from the cemetery, stood on the sideboard beside the silver
ice-water pitcher with sweating sides, that was mounted like a patent
rocker and tilted in its frame for pouring.
Emma had baked it that morning in her white-enamel range, the first
in Centralia, that had just been installed in her fine new red-brick
Georgian house, that stood on exactly the opposite end of Sycamore
Street from her parents. It was made out of double cream, that torte,
and seemed ready to burst its steep sides and melt into a viscous pool
of its own richness.
There was the kind of superabundance of food that palls before it
tempts. That was why Henry Schuyler, who abhorred waste, never came
downstairs on these holiday fêtes until after the mumbled grace, the
fruit cocktail, the chicken soup, and the creamed oysters in pâté cases.
Just before the fowl was brought in, usually one of Rebekka’s
eighteen-pound gobblers, with protruding legs in jolly white-paper
caps, Mathilda rapped against her water-tumbler three times with her
fork.
That was the signal for Henry, whose room was directly above the
dining-room, to put down his _Leatherstocking Tales_, Carlyle’s _French
Revolution_, or Fiske’s _American History_, knock his pipe empty into
the coal bucket, remove his feet from the nickel-plated rim of the
base-runner, and go downstairs to mid-afternoon dinner.
They hung on his digestion like leaden weights, these post-convivial
afternoons, causing him to fall asleep later with a newspaper over
his face, noxious dreams and the goose-fleshing memory of the sound
of steel carving knife and fork, criss-crossing, crawling across his
befogged doze.
At the coming of the fowl, the Old Gentleman began his invariable
sharpening of the hartshorn knife against the rod, curdling the air in
a fashion that gave Henry nervous shudders, and, ever since she was old
enough to remember, had sent the goose-flesh flashing along Rebekka.
“Father, please!”
“Puppa, you know how Bek and Henry hate it. Trina sharpened them out in
the kitchen.”
That was the signal for the Old Gentleman to wield the wicked knife,
jerking a turkey leg backward and slithering into the soft flesh, with
a rush of juices.
“Here, Mother, you want the part that goes over the fence last.”
The family was pretty well reconciled to this moss-grown overture. All
except Emma, who would invariably pucker her pretty blonde brows and
come out in no uncertain terms.
“Father, that’s not one bit funny! It’s disgusting! Besides, Mother
doesn’t really like it. That’s her way of denying herself white meat.”
The small, bewildered face of Mathilda Schuyler, there in the midst of
her five progeny of unusual heft, would begin to pale and wilt under
the dicker. Their vitality sapped hers. Her daughters, with their heavy
shoulders and strong legs and strong neck-columns. Phil, who in his
late twenties was already so rotund as to know his watch pocket by
touch rather than sight. Henry of brown brawn, but no fat.
It was a fluttery old face, that of Mathilda Schuyler. Like a curtain
in a breeze.
It was a face which the Old Gentleman, sly, wry, bold, and humorous
behind his own square trim of white beard, usually regarded with
precisely the expression with which he now regarded his grandchildren.
Only, this day, there screwed itself into the old man’s eyes, as
he observed her from his place opposite her end of the long table,
something sly. The old man became a little faunal. A naughty old faun.
“Emma’s right, Mathilda! From now on I’ll serve you only with white
meat. It’s good for what ails you.”
“Why?” said Phil, who made rapid, cracking noises up the stalk of a
celery stick. “Isn’t Mother well?”
“I’ve never seen her look better,” said Rebekka into the flash of quick
anxiety that went around the table. “Mother has gained pounds!”
Rebekka was five-feet-ten, weighed one hundred and seventy, and had no
fat. Level of eye, level of strong, firm bosom. Level of brow, from
which she wore the enormously thick brown hair coiled unstylishly on
the top of the back of her head. Level of voice, too. One of those low,
middle-register people. Without being masculine, there was something
rather Socratic about the head of Rebekka Renchler. A brow that jutted
firmly over the deeply-molded roofs of eye sockets. A fine, strong,
fierce nose. Mouth brackets.
It was characteristic of the family to discuss any one of its
members as if the individual under scrutiny were not present. It was
particularly a family habit to discuss Mathilda over her head.
“Father!” said Rebekka suddenly, and then again sharply, “Father—what?”
There was no denying it. Above the square white beard that hung like
a muslin curtain from the Old Gentleman’s chin, were two round dots
of color. A shrewd, old, sly face, trying not to look abashed, and
humorous eyes, twenty years too young for their weather-beaten setting
that kept radiating lines.
That was the Old Gentleman’s method of laughter. Behind the beard, that
was slightly yellow about the mouth, the lips, heavy and of a raspberry
red, remained mobile. It was the sunburst of lines at the ends of his
eyes that kept radiating a sort of heat lightning of laughter.
“Once a good strong woman,” said the Old Gentleman, letting his naughty
old gaze spray over his wife, “always a good strong woman.”
“Not at all, Father!” said Rebekka. “Mother’s endurance at fifty-three
is simply amazing, and see how frail she looks. Every one of us is big
enough to carry her off single-handed, and yet she goes on from break
of dawn until bedtime, slaving, slaving away as if things were no
different now than when we were children growing up.”
“Ah, she’s a good one!” said the Old Gentleman, winking his two eyes
simultaneously at his wife, who fluttered. “She’s a good one all
right!” And, incredibly enough, made a screwing noise with his tongue
and slid his naughty, bright-blue, humorous, twinkling eyes.
“Puppa, don’t do that!”
“Don’t do what, Mathilda?”
“That! That!” echoed Emma, who could cry from being made nervous by
what she considered her father’s none-too-subtle sense of low comedy.
“With your eyes, Father! It’s—it’s horrid! What is it, dear, makes you
do it?”
“Your Mother’s a good one, Daughter! That’s all! Don’t we sit down to
table, twenty-odd of us—Thanksgiving?”
“Yes, Father!” said Emma faintly, and regarded her mother for the
moment as if she were going to cry now.
“Pass Mother the gravy,” said Rebekka, in her low, rather hoarse voice.
It was her way of sparring off for the group of them a moment that
threatened to become sentimental.
“No, serve the boys, Puppa.”
“No, the Mama comes first!”
“Please—the boys——”
There was something about the mere idea of her brood assembled, that
could send the tremulous wavering along Mathilda’s voice. Probably the
unbelievable precariousness of it. Six children into the world with
perfect sequence except for the infant mortality of the first-born,
Mathilda. Nine grandchildren without a casualty. Except perhaps Leslie.
And yet Mathilda sometimes wondered, regarding the boy’s pale head and
his eyes that looked tranced as if with enchantment at what they saw,
if he could be classed a casualty.
Rebekka, though, who had borne him, must have thought so. Her eyes,
when they looked at this boy of hers, seemed to pour inward, leaving
them staring, like empty lake-beds.
Leslie, who was twelve, sat at the younger children’s improvised table
under the stairway.
At the oval-topped table in the sitting-room, which ordinarily
held the four-pound family Testament and a pair of brown porcelain
pug-dogs, chipped from being hidden by this or that one of the Schuyler
girls, only to be unearthed again by Mathilda, were Rebekka’s Steve,
who at eleven looked like the young San Sebastian, and who, to his
grandfather’s delight, could quaff cider like a sailor, licking his
lips and drawing his arm across them; and Rebekka’s only daughter, a
pretty, fair girl, whose dark eyes flashed a curious contradiction to
her placid, taffy hair.
It was as if, on holidays, the family thus assembled, the old House on
Sycamore Street must fairly burst its weather-colored sides of hubbub.
The Old Gentleman loved the hubbub. It flowed over him with the voice
of a world he had peopled. The town, the county, and even the state
bore testimony to Schuyler progeny.
Rebekka’s model stock-farm, High Ridge, was one to which the entire
state pointed with pride.
Phil Schuyler was already, though destined for temporary defeat, a
moving figure in what were to be spectacular land deals in the history
of Springfield. Henry Schuyler, who coveted no man’s office, had twice
been approached to run on a Republican ticket, once for Congress and
once for District Attorney, and frequently, Cincinnatus-like, had been
called from his small environment to his state capital, and twice to
Washington, on a point concerning certain legalities of water control.
Yes, the Old Gentleman loved the hubbub of his progeny about him,
and today somehow, with the two polka-dots out on his cheekbones and
his eyes in that faun-like crinkle—there was something about the Old
Gentleman——
Rebekka, who was fond of saying that she knew her father like a book,
and who bartered heifers with him in the open cattle-marts, who housed
his sheep for him in winter in exchange for the second crop of his
South Meadow of alfalfa, and who carried a pot of her own concoction of
cocoa butter in her great leather reticule, for his finger-tips, which
cold split terribly in winter, kept sitting more and more stiffly at
his right.
Even Henry, who had a way of looking at no one yet seeing everyone,
threw his father an occasional glance. Emma was on edge. Ever since she
could remember, there had been things her father did that affected her
like the scratch of a gold ring across a slate. His way of standing
her on the oval-topped parlor table when she had been a child and
pointing out her blonde prettiness to visitors. “She’s a good one,
isn’t she?” In Emma’s opinion, as if she had been so much heifer flesh.
The Old Gentleman’s insistence, during Emma’s second year in High
School, of driving up after her in a dirty old phaeton that barely
escaped scraping the streets. “The Floozy Flump” they used to call it
at school. “Here comes Emma’s Floozy Flump,” would reach her stinging
ears. It was precisely the same way she used to feel later, in the days
when her husband, Morton Milliken, had been wooing her and the Old
Gentleman would sit on the side verandah evenings in his socks, sucking
his atrocious meerschaum, just about the time Morton was due to arrive.
That whole group of grosgrained sensations was on a par with what her
father was doing to her now. What made him squint so? The face of
Mathilda kept fluttering, in the way it had when agitated.
There was undoubtedly in the air the charged quality of something of
note about to happen in the Schuyler family.
A Schuyler must be about to be born. Another impending grandchild?
Which of the girls was with child? Or, by a stretch of the imagination,
was some one, a Schuyler, on the verge of being rebuked? Who?
The sisters and sisters-in-law felt along one another with their eyes.
The bright, inquisitive, rather merciless eyes of women who suspect.
Rita Schuyler, Phil’s wife, had had her last child. A recent operation
had settled that. Well, that left Rebekka. Nonsense! And Clara. No-n-o.
Slowly the women’s eyes swung to Emma, who squirmed and felt more and
more irritated and could have sobbed her denial.
There came Phil’s dry little bronchial cough that always attacked him
when he felt called upon to defend himself before his father. There
had been many such stormy defenses. The troublesome time of Phil’s
narrowly-averted bankruptcy in a land deal known as the Alleghany
Subdivision, against which both his father and Henry had advised. There
had been another jam, when Phil, on the inside tip of a street-car
franchise, had formed a company to buy up two blocks of Hinshaw Street,
only to have the street-car finally run two blocks this side of Hinshaw.
There could be high words between Phil and his father.
And yet the family’s outstanding events had had chiefly to do
with celebration. To be sure, there had been family conclave and
remonstrance when Rebekka had held out for marrying Winslow Renchler,
several years her junior and a sickly fellow. Clara’s marriage to Sam
Holly, a city salesman for the great wholesale firm of Hamilton-Brown
Shoe Company, St. Louis, had also met a certain mild opposition. Sam
Holly was an admirable young man in the good-as-gold sense of the
word. He had no vices; and his virtues, although they made you yawn,
made you yawn righteously. The name Holly in St. Louis was synonymous
with a large dry-cleaning concern. But it was owned by Sam’s uncle,
who had never done a turn for his nephew. Sam and Clara had met at the
St. Louis Exposition. There was something handsome about Sam, who had
iron-gray hair at thirty; and yet, as the Old Gentleman said after
reviewing the rather patient-faced young wholesale shoe-salesman when
he came wooing to Centralia, he had somehow the face of a man with no
future.
Then there was that conclave of a winter five years previous, when
Henry had refused the amazing and unsought opportunity to run for
Congress on a strong Republican ticket. That had been a blow, even
though the Old Gentleman had valiantly come to see his elder son’s
point of view. And besides, even the sting of a secret disappointment
was practically gone now, in the curious and palmy circumstance of the
world finding its way to Henry’s little old one-horse law office up
over Schlemmer’s Hardware Store on High Street.
The Old Gentleman had shone of eye like this, upon the occasion of the
engagements of all Schuylers. Upon the announcement of every one of the
impending births of the grandchildren. The day the honor of the request
of Henry’s candidacy was announced. Always around this very same table.
Only, somehow, never before so much so. This day his eyes went screwing
around in his head. Of mischief. Making the occasion, to his children
who knew him, seem more and more portentous. Of an ultimate solemnity.
Mathilda cut the segments of pie, alternating the lemon and the mince,
until the children’s table had been served and the Old Gentleman’s
match held to the suet pudding, so that the thin blue flicker of
lighted cognac began to flit along it, and the children shouted and
gouged unruly spoons into the fire-dance.
Candied apples, and persimmons for the game of pucker, and home-made
taffy still in the greased pie-pans, were passed around to the
youngsters, and after-dinner coffee in large cups to the elders.
Curtains were drawn and a pail of coal tilted into the base-burner
until it roared. A pair of old silver candlesticks on the two little
curlicue shelves of the walnut sideboard were lighted by the Old
Gentleman, who held each flame in the shell of his hand until the light
grew round and steady. Then Henry, who was six-feet-one, and had arms
that dangled to his knees, lowered the swinging-lamp that swung on
chains over the table, and lighted the Welsbach. It had once been an
oil-lamp before gas became everybody’s commodity. For thirty years, an
old buckeye had dangled from it by a string.
Trina cleared the table, aided and abetted by the Schuyler girls, who
were cocksure about withdrawing the additional leaves, passing in and
out with stacks of scraped dishes, sliding napkins into their rings,
crumbing, folding and laying away the tablecloth in its place under the
sideboard, and spreading a red rep one with black fringe in its place.
Mathilda had her own way of placing the silver fruit bowl, upheld by
three silver cherubs and laden with “Rebekka Wines,” in the center of
the cleared table. The cherub with the deepest dimple in his chin must
always face the South Meadow window.
Then Trina drew the walnut folding-doors, shutting out the children.
Against the plate-glass of the door that led from the dining-room to
the small side porch, it had begun to snow. Big flakes that whitened
the air, but darkened the sky. The slanting roof to the wood-shed was
already lightly covered.
Through the heavy, closed folding-doors, the children could be heard
making a scramble for leggings and reefers, and fumbling in the hall
closet for rubbers and hockey sticks.
“Winslow,” said Rebekka, “hadn’t you better bring Leslie in here?”
“Wait a minute,” said the Old Gentleman, and brought his hand down on
his son-in-law’s, pinning it.
“Father!” said Emma and Clara simultaneously, in a sort of bleat, and
Phil began to cough in the way he had.
The group about the table tightened into the proportions of the table
with the three leaves removed. Mathilda with her timid face and her
timid lips lifted to simulate a smile that twisted Rebekka’s heart
strings with its pitiableness. Twelve faces swimming up closer in
concentration upon the old face above the spade of beard, at the head
of the table, with the sly eyes of a naughty boy screwing in his head.
“Heinie!” faltered Mathilda, calling him faintly by a name she had not
used since Rebekka had been born.
“Children,” said the Old Gentleman, simulating elaborate innocence
of any realization whatsoever that what he had to say was about to
splash over the occasion like a dash of ice-cold water from a bucket.
“Children, it is a Thanksgiving Day for every Schuyler to remember.”
“Puppa!”
“For goodness’ sakes, Father,” cried Emma, the bright tears in her eyes
drying because her eyeballs were so hot and angry, “for goodness’
sakes, Father, the idea of acting—so—horrid. What is it all about,
Father?”
“Really, Father, Emma’s right!”
“If you’ll hold your horses,” said the old man on a strangely forced
chuckle, “you’ll know.”
“Well?”
“Well?”
“Puppa!”
“Oh, for goodness’ sakes——”
“Sh-h-h, Em.”
“Well, Father?”
“Your mother, children, God bless her, is going to have a baby.”
“Winslow,” said Rebekka, in a voice that seemed to be running out of
her like sands out of glass—“awfully silly—but—glass of water—please—I
think—I’m going to faint.”
“For Heaven’s sakes, Rebekka, don’t do that!”
“Of course, I’m not! Give me a drink!”
“Puppa,” said Mathilda, and leaned forward to straighten the third
cherub’s dimple further toward the window that looked out on South
Meadow. “It—it is too hot in here, open—open the window——”
To cross that room, to open that window, was like walking through
the buckshot of twenty-two glass eyes, that were looking at the Old
Gentleman as if seeing him for the first time.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]