I
It was the old lady’s birthday. She was eighty-two years old and well
preserved. To be sure, she was a trifle deaf, but not so deaf as she
usually made out. She could hear conversations not intended for her,
though she had an annoying way of saying “heh?” when she didn’t want to
hear a thing. Then, after it had been repeated two or three times she
would pass it off as of no consequence, and few things warrant triple
repetition.
The old lady was proud of her age. After all, the fact that she had
lived so many years was the most remarkable thing about her, as it
usually is the most remarkable thing about people who live long. She
had outlived her friends, her generation, her welcome.
She was still useful and quite paid her way. She lived with her son,
Herman Potter, a thin man of over fifty, who had leather skin and a
bald head, and his wife, Minnie, a too-fat woman of the same age, given
to useless talk, exclamations and mild hysteria.
There were five children in the family of Herman Potter and one
grandchild. They all lived at home except Roger, who was married and
in business in Harrington. Fred, the oldest, nearly thirty, had been
married but his wife had run away two years before with a soap drummer.
Lucius and Phillip, the other sons, had never married. Fanny, the
one daughter, had had marital misfortunes, also. She had married, at
twenty-four, and a couple of years later her husband had “gone out
West to try his luck,” and she had never heard from him again. Now she
had a divorce, granted on grounds of desertion, and was ogling every
unattached man in Graniteville. She had one child, a peevish, pale
little boy of four, named Elbert.
The old lady had had three children. The older son, Morris, lived
in Kansas City, but Morris’ wife absolutely refused to consider her
husband’s mother as a part of her household. In fact, Morris’ wife felt
that she had married beneath herself by accepting Morris at all, and
held herself aloof from Morris’ family. The old lady’s only daughter,
Martha, was dead. Martha had been her favourite child. Martha’s husband
had married again. Her only child, Helen, was married and lived in
Chicago.
The old lady’s life was uneventful enough and not unhappy. She was the
first one up in the morning because she “didn’t need much sleep.” She
would dress quietly, so as not to wake any one. If, occasionally, she
stumbled against a chair, some one would be sure to say, at breakfast,
“Didje hear Gramma? She woke me up, knocking around before daylight.”
The old lady was not very steady and had to hold on to things sometimes
when she walked.
There were always unwashed dishes from the night before. The old lady
would wash these and then put on the oatmeal for breakfast. There was
always oatmeal because it was cheap and filling, and the old lady was
there to attend to it. She herself didn’t like oatmeal, though she
listened each morning to Herman and Minnie who would say, “Gramma, you
ought to eat some of this. Fine. Nourishing. Make you grow young.”
The old lady would purse her thin lips and then answer, politely
enough, “Thank you, but I’m not one that’s much for oatmeal.”
For breakfast the old lady would drink a cup of coffee without sugar,
but with milk in it. She preferred cream but didn’t dare say so for
the cream pitcher was small and the men helped themselves to it first.
After breakfast, if there was any coffee left in the coffee-pot, the
old lady would drink another cup, standing up in the kitchen, trying
to force a few drops out of the cream pitcher to put into it. If there
was fruit for breakfast, the old lady was given the worse piece. She
contented herself with one piece of toast, sparsely buttered, for she
always felt Minnie’s eyes on her when she helped herself to butter. The
old lady didn’t have a very large appetite.
After breakfast she would help her daughter-in-law with the dishes.
Fanny affected delicacy. She was lazy and housework annoyed her. She
spent the mornings in her own room reading magazines or running blue
ribbon through her lingeries or making rather effeminate little suits
for her son.
The old lady was always afraid of her daughter-in-law. Minnie was fat
and slow-minded. She was constantly telling the old lady how glad she
ought to be because they were all so “well fixed.” She liked to spend
a long time discussing trifles, how Mrs. Fink’s dress hung and didn’t
Gramma think it was her last year’s dress made over—she had a blue
dress last year, remember?—and did Gramma think the butcher gave good
weight—they had just one meal from that pot-roast, and here there was
hardly enough of it left to slice cold.
The Potters lived in a large, square house. Herman had bought it at
a forced sale when the children were small. It was painted brown and
there were big trees around it. It looked gloomy. It had been one of
Graniteville’s best streets but the business district had been creeping
close until now a garage stood across the street and a store selling
cigars and notions just two doors away. There were numerous small
rooms in the house and this meant housework. Herman always smiled
patronizingly when “the women folks” spoke of the difficulty of keeping
the house in order. He was well-to-do in a moderate Graniteville way
and was considering changing the Ford for a larger car but he didn’t
see why three women couldn’t keep a house clean without outside help.
They gave out the washing, didn’t they?
Herman didn’t consider that Fanny did none of the housework and that
the old lady really was old, that it was almost a task to walk,
sometimes, and that on damp days when her shoulders ached it was rather
difficult to try to dust, even.
In the afternoon when the house was in order, the old lady would
embroider. She did things for all of the family and for the friends of
Fanny and Minnie and for church bazaars. She did guest towels, making
them even more annoying by the addition of bright blue “blue-birds
for happiness” or impossible butterflies; shoe bags with outlines of
distorted footwear to explain their use; dresser scarfs with scalloped
outlines which didn’t launder well.
The old lady did the best she could. She made things people liked and
asked for. The only times she ever received praise were when she gave
away her finished works of art. She never complained about her eyes,
though they did hurt after she bent over her sewing for two or three
hours at a time. She preferred to read, though the family took only the
cheapest magazines full of sensational stories or articles about motion
picture actresses. Sometimes the old lady would go to the Carnegie
Library and bring home novels, favourites of thirty years ago, but the
family laughed at her when she did that.
In the evening the members of the family would go their various ways
without bothering much about her. Fanny would persuade one of the boys
to take her to the movies or she would go with a girl friend, loitering
on the way home in hopes of being overtaken by masculine admirers. The
boys would go to the movies or to a vaudeville show or play pool. They
belonged to a couple of lodges, the kind of lodges that are supposed to
have international significance—you can give the distress sign to the
ticket-seller and get a ticket to Europe in a hurry, though none of the
Potters would probably ever want to go to Europe. They liked the idea.
A boast of one of the lodges was that none of its members had ever been
electrocuted and, though none of the boys looked forward to a life of
crime, they accepted the fact eagerly and repeated it as something
pretty big for the lodge. The lodge rooms were pleasant places to waste
evenings. Minnie and Herman patronized the motion picture theatres,
too, but they cared more for cards than for the drama, even in its
silent form. Nearly every evening they went to one of the neighbours
for a game of bridge or poker or had a few guests in. At ten-thirty
there were refreshments of rye bread and cheese and sardines, known
as “a little Dutch lunch,” and appreciated each night as if it were a
novelty.
The old lady didn’t go out much evenings. She walked slowly and
stumbled a great deal, so no one liked to bother with her. At the
movies she couldn’t read the captions easily and that meant some one to
read them aloud to her, and the family didn’t consider that refined.
She could not quite master the intricacies of bridge even enough to
fill in when another player was needed, though she tried pitifully
hard and her hand shook if she held the cards. The old lady would sew
or read. There were socks and stockings to be darned and clothes to be
mended, besides the embroidering, so she had enough to do.
About nine she would nod over her sewing, pull herself together,
ashamed, and look around to see if any one had observed her, when there
was any one at home to observe, which was seldom enough. She would
start sewing again, drop off into a doze, start up, finally take her
sewing and retire to her bedroom.
The old lady had a fine room. Any of the family would have told her
that. It was above the kitchen and got the winter winds rather badly,
so that the old lady frequently had sniffy colds, but it was a fine
room, nevertheless, with two windows in it. The one bathroom was quite
at the other end of the hall, but, after all, one can’t have everything.
Two of the boys roomed in the attic, so the old lady could feel that
she was having quite the cream of things to be on the second floor.
Fanny and her little boy had the front room because Fanny often brought
home one of “the girls” to spend the night or her women friends would
run up to her room to take off their hats. Her room was done in
bird’s-eye maple with pink china silk draperies. Herman and Minnie had
the next room. They used the furniture they had bought when they first
went to housekeeping, a high maple bed and an old-fashioned dresser
to match it. On the walls were enlarged crayon portraits of the old
lady and of Grandpa Potter, who had died fifteen years before. Didn’t
having these pictures show what the family thought of the old lady?
The pictures had hung in the living-room until Art descended on the
household, a few years before, when they had been removed in favour of
two Christy heads, a “Reading from Homer,” “The Frieze of the Prophets”
and “Two’s Company.”
The old lady didn’t have a hard life. She knew that. She was quite
grateful for everything that was done for her. She liked housework,
even. Of course, Minnie had rather an annoying way of taking all of the
pleasure out of it. Minnie did all of the ordering, all of the planning
of meals, the preparing of the salad, when there was a salad, all of
the interesting, exciting things connected with the kitchen. But, after
all, wasn’t it Minnie’s house? Hadn’t she a right? Grandma knew she
had liked doing things in her own home. She didn’t blame Minnie but
it made things a bit monotonous. Not that things weren’t nice, though,
a room all to herself, even if the furniture was rather haphazard,
lots of time to herself, things to embroider. If Grandpa Potter had
lived—but, of course, he wasn’t alive, any more than any of the other
relatives and friends of those other days were alive, the Scotts, the
Howards—Martha.