[10] I think we had the most beautiful kitchen in the world in the
House on Sycamore Street. Old Trina used to tell us how the Welsh love
their kitchens. Normandy is filled with quaint, curtained, shining
kitchens after every woman’s heart. The kitchen plays no mean part as
the social center in the entire history of civilization. To the Dutch
and the Danes, it is still literally the nucleus of the home.
Our kitchen was that. Father originally built a house of one room.
A kitchen-living-bedroom. It ran, of course, the width and length
of the building. A long, low room, with oak rafters and an open
fireplace with a spit. Later, when the original room was surrounded and
surmounted by more rooms, the enormous fireplace was fashioned into a
bricked-in range. And what a range! It had a hot breath that warmed
through the fine thick walls. It could roar with a draught the like
of which I have never seen since. In winter, even after the house had
grown to proportions sufficient to comfortably house a family of five
youngsters, that range attracted us like a great flame all the little
moths. We toasted corn over its red caves. Baked yams and marshmallows
in its fierce oven. Dried our snow-clogged clothing before its Sahara
breath. Usually, there was a baby lamb or an ailing calf or a cat with
a leg in a splint in a chip basket beside this astonishingly maternal
stove.
It was a more beautiful kitchen than Washington Irving’s. It had
mullioned windows that opened outward. In summer, they were grown over
with columbine, that had to be kept clipped in order to allow opening
them. There were two long white-pine tables in our kitchen, big enough
to seat eight. On a bench, beside one, was a wooden bucket, with a
dipper gourd, filled with the coolest cistern-water in the county. A
second bucket was filled with well-water. Softer, for cooking. How
well I recall the festoons of peppers. The hearth-broom made out of
the left wing of a rooster. The great crocks of the various greases my
mother rendered from goose and hen and parts of the hog. There was a
wooden box in one of the window-sills stocked with twists of newspaper.
Firelighters. A rifle, sans barrel, and with a broken cock, said to
have belonged to Daniel Beinville, hung over the door.
My mother’s pleasant mania for starched ruffles asserted itself
everywhere. Along the shelves of the safe. Along the muslin curtains
in the sweet old mullioned windows. We used to tease her about these
ruffles. Yes, there was a God Bless Our Home sampler over the cupboard
door, and a small white ruffle along the shelf that bore it. And a
clock, mahogany, with a nosegay painted on its glass door. This clock
may be seen in the American Institute in Baltimore. Every Schuyler of
us has reason to remember this kitchen with affection.
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Six_
It was one of those days like Christmas or Washington’s Birthday, or
Father’s birthday, or Fourth of July, or April Fool. One of those
particularly nice days with an underlying current of events to it.
First, Stevey was coming home from Agricultural. “For good,” Claire had
said and kissed Davey square on the lips and hugged him until his cap
came off. Then there was the something pending about Henry. Henry, it
seemed, could have had celluloid buttons, with his picture on, that you
wore on the visor of your cap. “Vote for Henry Schuyler.”
Phil was coming in on the four-twenty-eight, too, and Clara from St.
Louis, but this time without Sam or the children.
But it meant meeting three trains practically at a scoop, because they
all arrived within three hours. The Old Gentleman never missed being
the first to welcome home a Schuyler.
Phil’s wife Rita always declared that her father-in-law’s basket
phaeton, a dirty affair much maligned by the family, which you could
see by craning your neck, as the Springfield train drew into Centralia,
was as much a part of the landscape as the Capitol dome was to
Washington.
The family was given to exchanging amused persiflage with one another,
and suggesting to the Old Gentleman, from time to time, that he
had better will over the phaeton to the State Museum as a relic of
pre-Civil-War transportation.
The Old Gentleman lived under a barrage of winks and nods between his
children. He moved calmly among them, oftentimes mimicking their very
gestures with his sly old eyes.
David liked meeting trains with his father. They swooped in
magnificent, whizzing reality from the world that lay flat and
inanimate in words against the pages of Henry’s books. Trains dashed
into Centralia depot that must have come from Gettysburg where Lincoln
made the speech. And from the shores of the Delaware that Washington
crossed. Why, there was a railroad called the Chesapeake and Ohio.
Chesapeake! Captain Lawrence cried “Don’t give up the ship” on board
the _Chesapeake_. There was a picture of the frigate _Chesapeake_, in
colors, in one of Henry’s books.
Yes, it was fine meeting trains. And the depot, a rather grimy, small,
red-brick affair, was filled with that intangible and tickling odor
of travel. The smell of leather and coal-smoke and pot-bellied stove,
red-hot. The baggage and shipping rooms, stacked with crates and bales,
trunks and milk-cans and egg-cartons and plow-shares and dynamos and
pumps and bicycles boarded up for travel along with shipments of
Centralia’s not inconsiderable exportations of hardware from the Tools
Works, were jammed with the further interest of reading labels. And
addresses. Braunson Hardware Company, Terre Haute, Indiana. Mr. Silas
Dikey, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Firbers Mill, Trenton, New Jersey.
United States Shipping Company, West Street, New York. It made one
tingle with a sense of the outside world. Alton, Missouri. Vesey
Street, New York.
Bob Fenton, the baggage-master, who had one eye and a black-cloth flap
for the other, gave David gummed labels, which could be spat upon and
pasted against all sorts of surfaces. Fragile. Hold. Live Stock. Eggs.
Baltimore and Ohio. Farmers Shipping Union. Glass. This Side Up.
There was sure to be talk as easy as the jangle of change in a pocket,
around the depot. Talk that ran like this:
“Hi, Schuyler! Got them two red heifers up at Seely’s place if you’n’
Miss Bek want to drive over tomorrow ’n’ have a look. Hi, Schuyler,
who’s coming home today? Hi, trade you that youngster o’ yourn for a
red calf. Hi, Schuyler, see that new breed of hogs Lederman is showing
up t’fair? White belly-bands. Look good. Wal, sir, see where they’re
mentioning Henry hereabouts for District Attorney. He’s got my vote.”
A vote was something you couldn’t see. People kept talking about them
and offering to give them, but nothing ever seemed to change hands.
A vote was something that was not something in your hand. Just the
same, if Henry wanted them, he could have them. Henry, who had a head
that was almost the shape of the bottom of a foot and a bald, shiny
spot where hair should have been, but hair that grew down the sides of
his temples into two oblongs on the sides of his cheeks, where hair
should not have been, and the very nicest eyes in the world that smiled
and did things that most people did with their mouths; it was highly
desirable that Henry should have all the votes in the world.
Even on the way to the depot, rumbling along in the Old Gentleman’s
phaeton, the way was strewn, from the sidewalk and from passing
vehicles.
“Hi, Mr. Schuyler. See to it that boy of yourn runs this time. The
state needs his kind. Hi. Howdy. Hi. Somebody acomin’ home, I take it?”
The Schuylers were rallying for conclave all right. It was fun rumbling
up to the depot with the Old Gentleman. It was in the days before his
self-importance had shrunk to a kernel. Was in the days when the dirty
old phaeton was only a badge of his unassailable well-being like a rich
man’s shabby hat.
Down Second Street toward the depot was the most familiar ride in the
world. When Davey was five, and the Old Gentleman dozed at the reins,
not infrequent with him, the small boy held them importantly. Not but
what every mare that the Old Gentleman ever drove knew its somnolent,
unguarded way through the streets of Centralia. Even when the
automobile had practically nosed out horse traffic, the Old Gentleman’s
mare and phaeton had a sort of right of way.
There was a flat building going up on Second Street. The first in town.
A square, two-story, two-family affair of concrete. A “St. Louis flat.”
The Old Gentleman could never pass it without clucking his disgust.
Further along, though, the street relapsed. The Blue Bird Lunch Room.
The Red Trunk Dry Goods Company. Binswanger’s Hardware. Hot Lunch.
The White Kitchen. Gents’ Furnishings. Buddy’s Cut-Rate Drug Store.
Co-Operative Mill Supply Company.
Beulah Kohn, who wore her left leg in a brace from meningitis, leaned
as usual across the picket fence of the dirt-colored frame house where
Mrs. Kohn kept a rooming house for mill workers.
“Hi, Mr. Schuyler!”
“Howdy, Beulah! Come out here and shake hands.”
“Now, Mr. Schuyler! ... you’ll hurt!” But out she came limping, while
the mare drew up, just as if this event did not take place every time
the Old Gentleman passed Beulah Kohn’s home. The Old Gentleman reserved
his trick, handshake for the very old, the very young, and the ailing.
You extended your hand. He took it gingerly by the tips of the fore
and little fingers, and then, with his free hand, came down whack
across the wrist of his victim, causing the bones to make a cracking
sound. The Old Gentleman’s delight in this was unfailing. Sometimes
children cried. Then he plied them with licorice. Beulah knew his
licorice-pocket, into which she dove immediately following this
habitual chastisement.
Rattly old phaeton. You could jump in and out while it was moving,
which David did all the way along.
Second Avenue, as it approached the depot, was myriad with interest.
“What does ‘Katy Flier’ mean, Father?”
“Katy flies, I reckon.”
“B and O,” began Davey, bursting for no apparent reason, as another
sign presented itself to his amiable gaze, into loud cacophony, and
beginning to direct an imaginary orchestra from standing position
in the phaeton, as he faced Jenny’s unexcited tail, “Bawleymore and
O-high-O! B and O. Yip! Yip!”
The Old Gentleman never minded. Sometimes David climbed up his flank as
he drove, balancing on his shoulders and shouting aloud as the little
panorama of his thoughts came tumbling.
The Old Gentleman never flecked an eye, or for that matter, heeded.
The train tracks cut through Centralia like a diagonal, bisecting a
rhomboid. Their grime kept the chestnut trees along Sycamore Street
gray. They grazed the red flank of the Five and Ten on High Street by
one foot. They skirted the edge of the Old Gentleman’s South Pasture
just remotely enough to have netted him not a penny when the railroad
was out franchise-buying.
It rushed into town like the proverbial lion.
It tore out of town like a howling hyena. Never was the somnolistic
tendency of a community more ruthlessly split to smithereens by the
bangs, the bleats, the bells, the puffings, and the backings of
steam-engines, than Centralia with the railroad trains across its very
face, as it were.
Siren-shrieks and plumes of smoke lay on its dead of night. Fee, fie,
foe, fum, snorted and rampaged one engine after another at the red
flank of the Five and Ten. Freight engines backed-and-forthed up and
down the center of Maple Street, baa-ing, moo-ing, and grunting with
cattle and freight cars. Fee, fie, foe, fum, I’ll blow and I’ll blow
’til I blow your house down. Where Maple Street intersected Second
Street, the railway’s gates were almost always down, Buick and Ford
delivery-wagons, farm-teams, buggies, roadsters and family-cars
waiting, and often, to save time, backing down and making détour around
the viaduct-way.
“Stop, Look and Listen” signs criss-crossed the streets of Centralia.
The local Democratic and Republican factions both had a Grade Crossing
Abolition plank. Nothing happened.
Centralia smelled with the railroad tracks that entered and intersected
her, and erected white crosses upon the scene of every grade-crossing
casualty.
Driving along Second Street, not only the Old Gentleman could detect
the first remote halloo of the incoming passenger train, but up went
old mare Jenny’s uncurried ears that were the shape of the perpetual
corner tied into the Old Gentleman’s handkerchief, and jerk went the
basket phaeton that was as full of creaks as of years.
Centralia met its incoming trains with a line of short-snouted
family-sedans and open Fords; occasionally the Milliken seven-passenger
Cadillac that belonged to Emma’s father-in-law, or the Howey
Pierce-Arrow, mixed in. They stood in motley line-up before a row of
what had once been hitching-posts.
The Old Gentleman’s phaeton and the yellow lorry from Dr. Spaeth’s
Sanatorium were usually the only relics of a horse-age. They waited
side by side in a little brick clearing opposite, where there were no
hitching-posts, and their horses wound necks.
Jenny knew her place all right, even when the Old Gentleman dozed,
edging herself and phaeton in beside the lorry, or where the lorry
usually stood. When David was along, even when he was so small that a
shake of Jenny’s neck jerked him forward by the reins, he drove her
quite grandly into the station, clucking at a great rate.
The Old Gentleman was not dozing today as he drove in. There was a
constant screwing noise he made with his tongue, spurring old Jenny
to uneven lopes; and above his square, white beard that hung like a
curtain, the humorous blue eyes, twenty-five years too young for their
setting, kept radiating. Phil’s wife was right. He was as indubitably
a part of the landscape as the rick-rack outline of the depot against
the stubble of corn-fields. In his hip-high reefer, jouncing along in
the old phaeton which creaked around him like a rusty ocean, he was an
institution for you! He was a silhouette unto himself, in reefer, round
cap bound in astrakhan, slightly mangy, in puttees, string-wound where
the tapes gave out.
“Old Gentleman’s quite a character,” someone or other was forever
saying.
“Hi! Howdy! Hi!” called the Old Gentleman, driving up.
“Hi! Hi! Ho! Howdy!” said the loiterers.
Almost simultaneously, Emma Milliken drove up in her father-in-law’s
car, a slick, night-blue affair of shine and snout, with a
nickle-plated Discobolus doing a lunge off the hood. Her
mother-in-law, Annie Milliken, occupied the rear seat, a sparse,
iron-gray woman, with a palsy-affliction that kept her head like a
flower on a stalk in a stiff breeze. Beside her, quite a beauty after
her blonde fashion, sat Claire, in a brown beaver toque and brown
beaver on her broad-cloth coat. Lalite and Kenneth Chipman, children of
Donald Chipman, barrister, next-door neighbors of the Milliken seniors,
were tucked into the collapsible chairs for the ride down to the depot.
They made a carful.
“Mother Milliken, there’s Gramp and Davey.”
Mrs. Milliken leaned her palsied head forward. “So it is. Your father
hadn’t ought to come down looking like that, Emma. ’Tain’t right. I
don’t see Mathilda.”
Emma wound down the glass window-pane of the car.
“Oh, dear! Your Gramp _does_ look a sight, Claire. How could he come
down to meet Phil and Stevey looking like that! Gramaw didn’t see him
leave the house looking like that, I’ll wager. Fath-er!”
The Old Gentleman shambled over, Davey off to the baggage-room, and
Jenny standing without so much as the reins wound around her whip stock.
“Father, come here. You do look a sight, dear.”
The Old Gentleman had never ceased to regard Emma, his sixth-born, as a
feast for even his sly old parental eyes. As a child, he had carted her
among the farmers and had even been known to stand her on the counter
of Fred Firpo’s bar and appraise her yellow, little-girl loveliness.
“She’s a good one, boys. My little Emma she’s a beauty! I’m right? Give
her a pretzel, Joe.”
Although it was Emma’s daughter Claire who was now considered the
family beauty, Emma herself still possessed a certain cabbage-rose
prettiness; and despite the fact that it had always been said that
Emma Schuyler did not know how to wear clothes, and was a natural-born
“slop,” she had realized enough to all her life affect velvet toques
to match her eyes, and when she remembered even now, she used a
gayly-painted rolling pin which hung in her bathroom, to ward off the
pads of fragrant, cream-colored flesh that threatened her shoulders and
upper arms.
“Father, Mother Milliken’s right. You _are_ a spectacle!”
It was rather futile of her to lean out of the car, tilt back his head,
and yank at his reefer-collar, particularly since little Lalite Chipman
was already at his reefer-pocket.
“Licorice, Gramp!”
“Please, Father, don’t give her any. She gets her teeth all full of the
horrid stuff.”
As if Emma herself, Emma’s Claire, and virtually every youngster of the
last four decades in Centralia had not, at one time or another, had
their milk-teeth blacked from the yield of those pockets.
“Gramp,” shouted Kenneth, who was nine and had the straight bangs of a
medieval saint, “give me a pretzel.”
“Guess which pocket,” cried the old man and struck his flanks.
“Both,” shouted the boy, and made a dive.
That tickled the Old Gentleman, who dove into a third pocket for more
lunch-counter loot.
“Please, Father, Mrs. Chipman won’t like it. There’s always tobacco in
that pocket. You’ll make Kenneth sick. Isn’t Mother coming down to meet
Phil?”
“Yes, Bek is driving her down.”
At just that moment, Bek drove around from the shipping-platform in a
Ford, with a hooded front and a delivery-body, onto which was loaded
a crate of Chester White hogs that she had just picked up from the
freight room. Seated beside her, in a little bonnet with a jet spray
and a cape with fitted shoulders, was Mathilda, her hands clasped
nervously over an empty shopping-bag of shiny black oilcloth.
David leaped the running-board before she brought the car to a short
stop beside the Milliken Cadillac.
“Bek, I c’n bound Ohio. Ohio is bounded on the west——”
“Davey, don’t hop a going car!”
“—by Indiana on the——”
“Look at Puppa!” cried Mathilda weakly and threw up both mittened hands
in a faint gesture, “And I laid out his brown pants on the bed.”
Emma and Claire had climbed out of their car.
“It’s a shame, Mother!” cried Emma. “I declare, Father, I wouldn’t come
down to meet a load of heifers looking like that. How do you think
Phil will feel stepping down off the express, with you looking this
way to meet him. There’s always plenty of Springfield and even Chicago
business-men on that train. And Stevey coming too. I declare, Mother,
I’d burn that phaeton, if I were you.”
“Puppa,” said Mathilda, a little tiredly, and a little helplessly, “I
laid everything out ... your cuffs with the buttons in——”
“Poppycock!” said Rebekka. “He looks all right. Let him be.”
The Old Gentleman made one of his sly, screwing noises with his tongue
and poked an elbow into his wife’s hip bone, where the cape neatly
covered it.
“I’ll dress up, ’Tilda, when we have an Attorney General in the family.
I’m right?”
“Does Henry know, Father,” said Rebekka, “that you sounded the
ram’s-horn for conclave about his candidacy? He’ll be a mad hatter.”
“What he don’t know don’t hurt him until he sits himself down to
supper,” said the Old Gentleman, and went off chuckling, with David
anchored to his pocket, burrowing for a pretzel, which had looked good
to him as he saw Kenneth nibble bites out of his.
“Bek,” said Emma, eyeing her sister, with a furrow between her pretty
eyes, “isn’t it sudden, Stevey quitting Agricultural this way in the
middle of a semester? Nothing wrong, is there? Never knew a word about
it until Claire told me she’d a letter——. Nothing wrong?”
“Nothing,” said Bek, looking straight ahead over the wheel upon
which her square, white hand lightly rested. “His father and I
think it best to have him home this winter. That’s all. It is good
practical experience for him to be around while the state dam is under
construction. He’ll learn more about practical irrigation that way in a
month than in a college year!”
“Funny, though, his coming so sudden,” said Emma.
It was as if the slight figure of Claire, standing beside her mother,
swayed as a fir tree sways, from its toe to its tip. An almost
imperceptible sway, except to Bek, to whom most tiny things were
perceptible.
“It’s Junior League afternoon, Claire. Why aren’t you there?”
“Just felt like running down to the station with Mother and Grandmother
Milliken to meet Uncle Phil and see the four-ten come in,” said
Claire, her pretty, her appealing but faltering blue eyes meeting the
absolutely horizontal ones of her aunt.
“And, of course, you wanted to come down to see Stevey too, dear,” put
in her mother, who was a great putterer in the name of amicability.
“You didn’t even know Uncle Phil was coming until Gramaw telephoned
just before we left.”
“And Stevey too, of course,” said Claire. Her voice was as thin as a
quail’s and her white young throat beat like one, as she met her aunt’s
gaze.
“Of course,” repeated Bek. Her voice was so level, to Claire swaying
there, like a vast and level plain.
“Bek,” said Emma, and leaned close, “Mother Milliken is so sensitive.
Hadn’t you better go pass the time of day with her? She gets more and
more sensitive as Father Milliken’s notes to Father fall due. Better go
over....”
“Indeed, yes,” said Bek. “Come, Mother, you too. And be sure you don’t
ask her about her brother in Saalsberg, Mother. Intimate as you are
with Annie Milliken, you cannot seem to remember that he died last
year.”
“I am glad you reminded me Bek, it does slip my mind. Saalsberg is so
far,” said Mathilda, lifting her skirts neatly, as her two daughters
and Claire assisted her down the step of the car. “I think I’ll take
her a bit of that nice, crisp celery; it’s under the seat. I just
picked it up at market.”
“Hurry, Mother,” said Bek, striding across the platform toward the
Milliken car.
“Bek,” said Mathilda timidly, and put out a restraining hand upon her
daughter’s stride, “I don’t want to seem unchristian, Daughter, and I
wouldn’t have Emma hear, seeing how bad’s Annie’s palsy, but you and me
riding up in the Ford truck, Daughter, and there sits Annie Milliken in
a Cadillac, them never out of your father’s debt.”
“Sense of humor, Mother,” said Bek, hooking her Mother’s arm into hers
and patting it. “The Lord gave us ribs so we could keep them tickled.”
“Yes, but not jostled, while Annie Milliken rests hers in an
upholstered limousine.” Just then Davey, spying little Dora Tarkington
walking primly into the depot with her hand in her father’s, made a
megaphone of his: hand and shouted to her:
“Stevey’s coming home!”
“Stevey’s coming home!” Bek’s heart, all the time that Claire’s was
fluttering like a bird’s, was heavy within her.
Stevey was coming home....
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
_Chapter Seven_
Phil was the first of the Schuylers to go chubby, as the saying is. So
rotund, in fact, that in his middle thirties, his waist-coat, that was
usually a none-too-subtle check of plaid, buttoned over a semicircle.
He was a teetotaler, from inclination rather than conviction, but there
was something in the veininess of Phil’s face and the drape of flesh
over the back of his collar that suggested alcohol.
There was an air of too-high blood-pressure about him. His face red and
his voice a little breathless. At thirty, Phil Schuyler had twice been
almost a rich man. The elusiveness of his quest glittered in his eyes.
It was as if in attempting to force his destiny, he had antagonized it.
“Anything very special, Bek?” he said, through the light peck he
deposited on his sister’s cheek, as she ran considerably ahead of the
others to greet him.
“They’re after Henry again. District Attorney this time.”
“Suspected as much. Well, he’s got to take it. If he doesn’t feel he
owes it to himself, he at least owes it to the family. Man can’t go
through life turning down one honor after another. Howdy, Father. Well,
Mother! Careful! There’s some geranium-cuts in this paper bag Rita sent
along for your side-yard borders. No, Rita decided not to come. Baby
seemed a little croupy last night. Well, Father, am I to ride in the
one-hoss shay?”
“Better men than you have ridden in it.”
“Dirty crack!” cried Phil, who was accustomed to his father’s easy
irascibilities where he was concerned.
“Puppa—Phil was only teasing.”
“Well then, so was I.”
“’S all right, Father. You’re immense.”
“So are you.”
“Now, Father, don’t taunt me for my figure. Who’s giving me a lift?”
“I’ll drive you home, Phil. I can bound Ohio—Ohio is——”
“Can you bind my kitten’s broken paw?”
“Phil!”
There ensued then the usual family-conclave, Emma bidding for Phil
to sleep in her spare-room, where he could have steam-heat, Mathilda
demurring that Phil’s old room in the House on Sycamore Street was
ready and the fire laid. Claire threw her young arms around her uncle’s
neck and begged him to wait for Stevey’s train and then to ride up in
the Cadillac, David meanwhile lugging his uncle’s valise, and almost
toppling backward with effort, toward the phaeton.
“No, never mind anybody waiting for Stevey’s train, Phil. Claire and
Emma will drop you and Mother at the House on Sycamore Street. Davey
and I will wait for Stevey.”
As she spoke, Rebekka’s eyes, round as two pinwheels, had come to full
stop upon her niece Claire.
“Go, Claire.”
“But, Aunt Bek,” faltered Claire, her blonde skin pinkening furiously.
“But, Aunt Bek....”
“Run along,” said her aunt and laid a firm, a heavy, an uncannily aware
hand upon the small, frail shoulder of her niece.
“But....”
“Claire!”
“But, Aunt Bek—my own cousin—coming——”
“A good thing to remember, Claire. Your—own—_cousin_.”
“Oh, you—” almost sobbed her niece, and ran after the others, with her
handkerchief pressed against her lips—“you’re—terrible to me.”
The family shooed off before Bek, with an automatic kind of
acquiescence.
There were only Davey and Bek left standing, wind-blown, on the
platform, as the five-fifteen, bearing Stevey, drew in.
* * * * *
How handsome Stevey was as he stepped off the day-coach, in his
slip-over sweater and a pigskin bag and a tennis-racquet in a case and
his cap crammed into his pocket so that his hair, Winslow’s waviness
and baby-fine brown, blew backward giving him a swift, winged look.
Stevey was really David’s eldest nephew. Leslie somehow did not count,
as ages go. A lean-jawed young fellow, with his father’s sensitive
nostrils and his mother’s level mouth. Gray-eyed, with the depth
to them that black lashes can lend; as indefinable a tang to an
expression, as the flavor of the caper to sauce. Personable, after
a fashion, cut along lines rather lighter than the Schuyler heft,
wide-shouldered, light-waisted, with something correct about the
line from femur to ankle that was not characteristic of the House of
Schuyler in general.[11]
“How handsome he is!” thought Bek even when he could not quite meet
her gaze in greeting. She wanted to take him in her arms, except that
it would have embarrassed them both. For one second it flashed over
her, as he made a quick movement of greeting, that the returning
prodigal might be going to take her in his. Flashed over her in a warm
goose-flesh. Of course, Stevey did nothing of the sort. People did not
take Bek in their arms. He did exactly what she gave him the cue to do.
“Hullo, Mother,” said Stevey, and flung out for her hand and shook
it low, down and vigorously. “Hi. Unk,” and caught up Davey by the
armpits, as he was forever being caught up.
“Stevey, I can bound Ohio.”
“Bound it tomorrow!”
“Stevey, me and Henry have a chart and we followed the American fleet
around the world with the red pins.”
“—as well as with breathless interest.”
“And, Stevey, I know where the American fleet was on February
twenty-first. Ha-waiian Islands, and Teddy fired a salute to Mo-lo-kai
where the lepers live. If I was a leper, I could get fired a salute at
by Teddy. Know what?”
“Dave, you run home now! Bek is going to drive Stevey home for Winslow,
and then we’ll all be over to Sycamore Street in time for supper.”
“Can I have a houn’-dog out of Tom Willet’s litter, Bek?”
“No, those Willet dogs are always flea nests.”
“The flea is a para-sit-ic animal that lives off——”
“Good Lord!” cried Steve and tossed him again. “Go tell your Brother
Henry to get you bound in a soft-leather edition and sell you from door
to door.”
“Run along, Davey, there’s a good boy, and tell Mother not to bother
about the sweet butter. I’ll stop by Koerber’s and bring a pat. Jump
in, Stevey.”
How easily as Davey with his short legs spun off toward Sycamore
Street, Stevey swung into the seat beside his Mother, not bothering to
open the door, just one long lithe leg after the other climbing over it.
“Shall I drive, Mother?”
“No,” said Bek, and threw a clutch that jerked them forward.
The town in its cold March drabs was a one-colored affair. Sky the
color of the weather-beaten boards that houses and fences and many
of its sidewalks were built of, dry wash in back yards half-frozen
and flapping stiffly gray, against gray sky, streets merging off,
with scarcely a change of gray, from the smoothness of made into the
roughness of unmade roads.
Down Second Street, Beulah Kohn still swung on the broken front gate.
“Hello, Miss Bek. Hel-lo, Stevey.”
“H’lo. Stevey, that’s Beulah Kohn, the one with meningitis. Poor child,
speak to her.”
“Hel-lo Beulah,” called Steve, and tried to smile through a face that,
once alone with his mother, had grown stiff-looking and white.
At the wheel, Bek’s hand, ungloved now, was large and calm and
pliable-looking as a surgeon’s. But inside, against the palm, it was
throbbing.
“Nobody knows anything, Stevey. Not even your father. The dean’s letter
came so—sudden, son. Your father might just as easily have been the one
to open the mail-box and—find it first!”
Steve moved his lips, but nothing came.
“I—I’ve explained to everybody that I want you home—while they’re
building the dam. Practical observation—irrigation, y’see?”
His face only whitened and tightened, and his lips handsome when in
repose, shirred inward now, like a scar. Out of the tail of her eye, as
she drove, Bek could see the young face becoming old. Terrifyingly old.
A scarred old walnut of a face.
“I’m no good, Mother. Sooner or later you’ll have to reconcile yourself
to everybody knowing that.”
“I’ll fight you to the finish,” said Bek, on a click of teeth, “before
I’ll make up my mind that a child of mine is no good.”
“It gets me, Mother. It burns me. It makes a human bonfire out of me.
There ought to be some cure for it, like there is for ulcers and scalds
and hydrophobia. It gets me. Help me, Mother!”
“Help me, Mother!” At that, a cry that suddenly became the cry of the
wind in her ears as they sped along; there lodged in Bek’s throat a
ball of ache, so that it was a block before she could muster voice. Her
kind of dead-level voice without flutter to it.
“I’ll fight with you, Stevey.”
“Help me, Mother!” Why, to Bek, trying not to wobble the wheel, that
was a cry in the wilderness. It smote her. It cut her in two. It
made her veer so suddenly, as she crossed Second Street, where it
intersected Elm, that Skeet Mapey, the sixty-year-old police man on
that beat, shook an unaggressive old finger at her, as they shot past
him.
“I’ll help you, Stevey, to help yourself. You hear me! No one can help
you but yourself.”
“Then I’m lost,” said Stevey, and quite horribly began to cry, sitting
there with his face twisted and his lips a knot-hole, and his chin all
tucked up like a weazened little old man’s.
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Bek kept saying to herself. “Help me to help this boy!
God, you—help me to help this boy!” She had the rather disembodied
feeling of everything within her stopping like a run-down clock.
A momentary inability to think or feel or do. A deadness, as if
circulation and heartbeat and the universe of her body had ceased.
“You can do everything, Mother. Save me.”
That warmed one back, somehow.
“Is it so terrible, boy?”
“It burns, Mother. Not like anything you’ve known. It cracks one’s
tongue, and then one’s whole body is like a cracked tongue—thirsting.
You can’t know—ever——”
“God knows, no, Stevey. Never in our family—anyone—anywhere—or in your
father’s—no one ever——”
“It’s like being lined with hot steel, Mother, that you want to cool by
making hotter. Or go crazy! Or go crazy! It’s hell, Mother. You’re too
strong to understand.”
“Too strong to understand.” There it was again. The alienating power
of strength. Too strong to understand, when the hand with which she
steered so surely was of flaming steel. The same flaming steel that
tortured Stevey.
“Oh, Stevey—tell me. Tell Mother. Before we get home. Nobody must know.
But you, Stevey, and me. We’ll fight it out. How did it happen again?
So suddenly—you promised....”
“Not suddenly, Mother—for a little while nobody there knew—that was
all——”
“Stevey, Stevey—as a child—as a little boy—you never even saw it around
you, and now—now this——”
“Never—except Gramp——”
“Gramp!”
“No. No. I mean, first I remember ever seeing the stuff at all—Gramp
used to keep a jug of cider in the phaeton for long drives—winter-time.
I remember once or twice taking a swig or two out of it if he fell
asleep at the reins. Remember, he used to think it amusing and cute for
me to do that. Way back there—me a kid—it used to warm me, Mother, in a
way I hadn’t ever felt before. I’ve always felt cold inside. Remember
how you used to fix me hot lemonades with mint in? ... that was because
I craved it. Even then. Warmth. Remember me always sucking peppermints?
That was it, Mother. The burning. The burning.”
“Oh, my boy!”
“That time you found me by the mill—that was the first time, Mother—I
was—that way. I’ve sworn that to you so often. You must believe.”
“I do.”
“And then—and then—after you got me away—the first three months—I
didn’t—not a drop——”
“That’s why, Stevey, when it came—so sudden—I had thought—you were all
right, boy——”
“Mother, those first months. The torture. No wonder my marks were
so bad. Mother, you’ll never know. I used to get up at night—and
run—Mother—go out and run around the track—until they began to get
on—and think me nutty. I tried so terribly, Mother.”
“Stevey! Stevey!”
“And then—the fellows—they began to rush me for Beta Beta. That was
the real beginning. I hadn’t even seen the stuff around, before I
began to get in with the frat crowd. And then seeing it—in bottles—on
tables—help yourself. The night they initiated me, I—that was the
beginning.... Ugh.... Mother——”
That cry in the wilderness. The rumble of the tinny little car over it.
“Shame, shame, Stevey.”
“Oh! Oh, Mother, if you only knew! If I had any guts—I’d kill myself!”
“No. No. No. Stevey, I’ll help you. Mother will help you.”
“You will, Mother. You will, won’t you?” And sobbed, without troubling
to cover his face, which somehow was most horrible of all to her.
“Father—what will he——”
“He mustn’t know, Stevey.”
“I couldn’t stand his knowing, Mother. Father so—so sensitive—so
nervous—I—he couldn’t stand it!”
“Father so sensitive. So nervous.” What was the secret of Winslow, Bek
asked herself. Not bitterly, but out of an enormous wistfulness and
fatigue.
“We’ll make our fight together, Stevey. I’m not afraid, Stevey—if
you’ll fight with me. We’ll win!”
“I will fight, Mother. There’s a bottle of—it—wrapped in a green
sweater in the bottom of my bag. Take it away from me, Mother.”
“You’ll win, Stevey, like that! You’re a Schuyler, son. There may be
families in the state hold their heads higher, but not any straighter.
Look at Davey, Steve. I always say he’s everything in us summed up.
Seventh child, I guess. Sturdy. Square. That’s us.”[12]
“Yes, Mother.”
“We’ve got to keep the family fine enough for him to grow up into,
son. Ever think of that? Hello there, Supe. Stevey, that’s old Lem
Dinwater’s boy. Speak to him. Supe, you tell your Pap to make me
another offer on that hog corn. He’s going to lose a good chance not
giving me a price on that feed. Good boy!”
“My Pap says you’n him can’t do no business, Miss Bek. My Pap says
you’re a better man ’n he is.”
“Hop out here, Stevey, and into the drug-store, and get me a bottle
of Sloan’s Liniment. One of my new mares has gone right lame in her
foreleg. Never mind, I’ll hop out myself. I want to see how Granny
Koerber’s asthma is today.”
“Mother, won’t that keep? How can you—_now_!”
“No, Stevey. My mare’s limping. Those things don’t keep.”
“But, Mother....”
“Open your suitcase there under the seat, boy. There’s something in it
wrapped up in a green sweater. A bottle of something I want to make a
present of it to Granny Koerber for her asthma.”