[4] The morning of the afternoon upon which my brother was to press a
button from Washington that officially put into motion the transfer
that marked the formal beginnings of the Philippine Free State, I found
him lying asleep in his study where he had left orders no one was to
be admitted but me. He looked drawn from the rigors of his epochal
Congressional address but otherwise strangely the boy. It may have been
his position in sleep. One knee drawn up under his chin and the back of
his hand curled against his neck—as I remembered him a hundred times in
childhood. For a fleeting instant it seemed to me that all the terrific
present fell away from us, and there he lay up in Stevey’s room—asleep
on the balsam mattress....
[5] My brother Davey used to ride my ironing-board beating his small
heels and dancing up and down as he sat astride. Flibberty-jibbeting,
he called it, for some mysterious reason of childhood. Friends who saw
this home-made device in my kitchen, advised me to have it patented.
Later, when reverses struck us and when I saw its counterpart become
a general commodity, I had reason to regret I had not capitalized
the little idea before others got in ahead of me and made my device
worthless.
[6] I know that there were those who thought I spoiled Winslow. Brother
Phil used to twit me about it good humoredly. If I did, it was to
try and repay the measure of happiness he brought me. Diametrically
opposed as we were in temperament, it was that very antithesis that
apparently brought us together. In all the years of our lives together,
up to the very hour of his death, I can truthfully say that it was
his fineness, his more delicate discernments, his dear unobtrusive
co-operation that brought me the more conspicuous success of the two.
As the brother-in-law of the President of the United States, and the
husband of a woman whose activities were destined to be more or less
conspicuous, Winslow never forfeited one of his splendid qualities to
those rather spectacular and at the same time enormously difficult
conditions. Neither did he ever avail himself of any largesse of
favor which might have come to him because of my brother. He sought
no favors. He asked precedence over no man. An artist of parts was my
husband, whose work, in my opinion, never won the wide approval its
gossamer beauty deserved. It was as a revered father, a beloved and
respected husband, that he was to come into his own. The day of his
death, the greater part of the light of the world went out for me.
[7] ... I was never able to take those differences of taste seriously
which accept the antimacassar in one generation and ridicule it in the
next. As I used to say to my daughter Paula, who before she became
State Superintendent of Schools had a small modernistic gift-shop
of her own in Cleveland, a good thought for anyone to hold, who was
over-impressed by the rightness of his own time as over and above all
other times, was Omar Khayyam’s salty old observation that tomorrow we
may be with yesterday’s seven thousand years. I often wonder to what
appalling extent my clear-eyed Paula must think me the old fogey.
[8] David never lost his childish fancy for my cookery. I recall
once, the second year of his first term as Governor, his visiting
the International Food Show, in the days before the general use of
dehydrated vegetables. There he stood before my booth where I was
demonstrating, in the name of this great food-revolution in which it
was my privilege to act as pioneer, and with cameras clicking upon him,
shamelessly devoured three portions of my dehydrated hominy prepared in
a fireless cooking-range and served piping-hot under molasses cubes.
[9] My brother Henry, never too reverent, used solemnly to recite
the rosary over my hominy. I can hear him now ... impaling with his
fork, to the rhythm of “each bead a pearl, each pearl a prayer.” Dear
Henry—simple spirit. Great spirit.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Five_
It was snug up where David slept. Bek’s covers were nicer to snuggle
into than the ones in the House on Sycamore Street. Chiefly because
Bek used quilts that an old farmer-woman over just beyond Cottage
Corner made with spud-like fingers out of the choice cotton and percale
scrappage of a county of attics. Blues and reds and grays and oyster
whites. There was one, Davey’s favorite, with a border that looked like
rows of intently listening rabbits’ ears. In Bek’s attic, it smelled
like calico as you tear it. Clean lint of the loom. There was a window
set in a slant of ceiling and sometimes it was entirely filled with
moon that made everything white except the shadows and the school
pennants that Steve had nailed up against the slopes of wall.
There was a moon tonight. He had a toothache. He often did when he came
up almost full, one of his cheeks bulging and making him lopsided. It
was nice to be tucked in bed at Bek’s under quilts that did not scratch
like the gray blankets in the House on Sycamore Street.
When blankets got old, sick ewes liked them. If a ewe-lamb got
sick, a very baby one, and you didn’t give it warm milk out of a
nursing-bottle, it died.
“Poor e-w-e. E-w-e. Y-o-u. Funny. How could you always know which of
the two meant? If you said, ‘You go downstairs,’ it couldn’t mean
e-w-e. But if you said, ‘poor e-w-e,’ then which you? E-w-e or y-o-u?
Henry would know even that.”
Haw, Leslie thought the bees carry honey up to the moon to make it
clear. Haw!
“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I
should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless
Mother ’n’ Father ’n’ Henry ’n’ Bek ’n’ Leslie ’n’ Winslow ’n’ Phil ’n’
Emma ’n’ Clara ’n’ Jacob ’n’ Hallie ’n’ ewes ’n’ Pete McNall ’n’ the
in-laws ’n’ nieces ’n’ nephews ’n’ Teddy and let me go to see him march
when he comes back from Africa ’n’ make Mother remember to feed the ewe
’n’ God bless me for not swiping Henry’s coon-skin cap for my tommyhawk
and bless we, the people of the United States in order to form a more
perfect union——we——the——people——of the United States, in——order——”
* * * * *
Down in Leslie’s room it was moonlight, too. It was not really a room,
but a sort of alcove that adjoined Bek’s and Winslow’s so that the
moonlight flowed in from their room.
That was exactly the reason of the alcove. Because it had no windows.
Sometimes Leslie walked in his sleep. There were bars across the window
in the big room.
The moonlight lay in a long patch. To Leslie, in bed it was like a
river. Of light. It fascinated him as things that gleamed always did.
He sat up in bed to feel the sway of its bright tide.
Leslie had a song. It went something like “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!” His
mother had attempted to teach him ballads, tried and true, but this one
was Leslie’s own. A little chant that he always sang with his long,
white eye lids closed. Henry, who knew his self-taught Greek, was wont
to observe with mock manner of pious rebuke, that there was something
Bacchanalian about Leslie’s choice of lyric outburst. “Evoe! Evoe!” The
call of Greek youth....
That last was enough for Bek. “Sing your song, Leslie. The song of the
Greek youths.”
Leslie, with the droop of his long, pale lids: “Evoe! Evoe! Evoe!”
“Go to it, Leslie! Vine leaves in your hair.”
“Don’t tease Leslie, Henry. It’s the perpetual call of youth in Leslie.”
Later, after she had come upon Stevey that first time behind the Cider
Mill, Bek had cause to feel her flesh crawl at that song of Leslie’s.
“Evoe, Mother!” he had shouted to her.
“Evoe! Evoe!” sang Leslie in bed, to the swinging tide of the
moonlight. The bright tide down which he could feel himself riding in a
skiff made out of a bed. “Evoe! Evoe!” The humming of voices from the
big room was disturbing. One of them a harsh, man’s voice, that split.
* * * * *
The humming of the voices was Rebekka’s and Winslow’s. Winslow was
lying rigid in bed, with the flanges of his nose quite green, and
Rebekka had the light on and was throwing an extra blanket, which
she had to stand on a chair to drag down from a closet shelf, on top
of him, and finally against his continued shudderings, his corduroy
jacket, with the strings of his tobacco-pouch dangling out of the
pocket.
“Making yourself sick isn’t going to help matters. I suppose I
shouldn’t have told you, but there are some things I haven’t the right
to carry alone. Besides, he will be home tomorrow.”
“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, through teeth that shuddered. “Damn
him!”
“Scarcely the most helpful way to set about getting Steve out of
this—mess.”
“I won’t have it!” said Winslow, and began to cry quite weakly against
the pillow; and along his brow and the backs of his hands, the
tallow-colored, moist pallor sprang out, and beads of moisture, in the
weakening fashion that Bek dreaded.
“It’s no wonder,” said Bek, standing surveying him and wanting to keep
her voice cold through her rising concern for him—“it’s no wonder I
carry everything alone sooner than go through this sort of thing with
you.”
“Young pup, he’ll not drag his family name into the dirt.”
“He will, unless you treat this matter like a problem instead of a
calamity.”
“I won’t have it!” cried Winslow, and beat with his hands into the
pillows and sobbed like a baby.
“It’s not a matter of what you’ll have. It’s a matter of what you’ve
got to face.”
“There’s something you’re holding back. There’s something more to it
than just withdrawing him from college at the dean’s suggestion because
he’s loafing. Boys don’t get fired for such small-fry offenses. There’s
been something more behind it right along.”
Rigid at his bedside, Bek bit her lips with the truth of this. But to
tell Winslow all the facts of his homecoming, she realized now, was as
impossible as it had been to tell him the truth of the hurried decision
to send him away.
This must apparently remain her fight and Steve’s. She had meant to
tell Winslow the why; the whole miserable why of the going and the
coming of Steve; of the wretched reason of her sudden determination to
send him to State Agricultural; of that first time behind the mill—that
second—third, fourth time. The deceits. The deceptions. She had meant
to tell him all, now that Steve was coming home, his secret pledges
to her shattered.... Winslow must fight the fight with her and Steve
now.... Winslow must be taught a quality of mercy and wisdom toward
his boy ... who needed him.
“I’m cold.”