"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off."
"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though.
Great!"
"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily.
They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in
Winnebago, always whistled mournfully, off key, when he shaved. The more
doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had
learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain.
Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all
over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the
happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known
that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious
bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding.
When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh,
take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster
used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can
start the eggs."
* * * * *
In the months of their gay life in Sixty-Seventh Street Hosey Brewster
never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet
By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or when he did, gay bits of
jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He
deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail
off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again,
heavily, as though it were a physical weight.
Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life!
"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say.
"Time of my life, father."
She had her hair dressed in those geometrical undulations without which
no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less
frequently as time went on and her feeling of responsibility lessened.
Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for
her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat,
slippers, gown, and manner equalled in line, style, cut, and texture
those of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she
had talked to five or six of them.
She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes. "Say, Milly," he
confided, "they're all from Wisconsin--or approximately; Michigan, and
Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can make out there's only one
New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of 'em."
"Which one?"
"That kind of plain little one over there--sensible looking, with the
blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York,
but she doesn't live here--that is, not in the city. Lives in some place
in the country, in a house."
A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to
talk to her, Hosey. Take me over."
She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the
quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's
fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do. "We live in Connecticut. You see, you
Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space.
Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say--live. And then the
children--it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love
it--oh, yes, indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult."
Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a
tiny apartment, with a kitchenette--"
The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But
she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still
wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the
slavery of it. That--that deceitful, lying kitchenette."
This was the first woman who Mrs. Brewster had talked to--really talked
to--since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At
first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on
Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvellously coifed
and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a
mysterious, heady scent, they were more like strange, exotic birds than
women.
The clerks in the shops, too--they were so remote, so contemptuous. When
she went into Gerretson's, back home, Nellie Monahan was likely to say:
"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster.
Let's see, you've had it two--three years this spring? My land! Let me
show you our new taupes."
* * * * *
Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine
individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was
startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's
simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two--perhaps
two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York.
"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said.
"Me? No."
"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't."
"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't
they? Most of 'em?"
"No! Out-of-town folks, mostly, like you. West--Iowa an' Californy an'
around there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they
come from. I dunno."
Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women.
He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath,
buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes,
with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white
linen collars. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his
square-toed shoes that made the difference, or his gray hat, or his
baggy trousers. It was something inside him--something he lacked, he
thought. It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed
that they did not.
"Enjoying yourself, Milly?"
"I should say I am, father."
"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?"
"It's play."
She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest, and the screen
pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way:
apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes;
sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly,
that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one
combination kitchen-dining-and-living room.
"Chops taste good, Hosey?"
"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out
to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show."
"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?"
"It's the life, mother! It's the life!"
* * * * *
His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department store
kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream
whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily
with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even
known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used
to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lively. The price
of butter, eggs, milk, cream, and the like horrified his Wisconsin
cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market
before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with
tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the
buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.
Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had
known back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around,
naturally, in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg
acquaintance, one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous Wisconsin
farming community. For his family's sake he had moved into town, a
ruddy, rufous-bearded, clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had
sold the farm with a fine profit and had taken a box-like house on
Franklin Street. He had nothing to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out
on the porch early, very early summer mornings.
You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant
there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he
had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its
black strength and its green tendrils down, down, until he ceased to
struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had
thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.
"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just
seemed to kind of pine away."
* * * * *
It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this
memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.
Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of
eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness
over him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the Subway
he had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face
was pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung
loose where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.
"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--"
He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into
the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A
great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.
The chill grandeur of the studio-building foyer stabbed him. The
glittering lift made him dizzy, somehow, this morning. He shouldn't have
gone out without some breakfast perhaps. He walked down the flagged
corridor softly; turned the key ever so cautiously. She might still be
sleeping. He turned the knob gently, gently; tiptoed in and, turning,
fell over a heavy wooden object that lay directly in his path in the dim
little hall.
A barked shin. A good, round oath.
"Hosey! What's the matter? What--" She came running to him. She led him
into the bright front room.
"What was that thing? A box or something, right there in front of the
door. What the--"
"Oh, I'm so sorry, Hosey. You sometimes have breakfast downtown. I
didn't know--"
Something in her voice--he stopped rubbing the injured shin to look up
at her. Then he straightened slowly, his mouth ludicrously open. Her
head was bound in a white towel. Her skirt was pinned back. Her sleeves
were rolled up. Chairs, tables, rugs, ornaments, were huddled in a
promiscuous heap. Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster was cleaning house.
"Milly!" he began, sternly. "And that's just the thing you came here to
get away from. If Pinky--"
"I didn't mean to, father. But when I got up this morning there was a
letter--a letter from the woman who owns this apartment, you know. She
asked if I'd go to the hall closet--the one she reserved for her own
things, you know--and unlock it, and get out a box she told me about,
and have the hall boy express it to her. And I did, and--look!"
Limping a little he followed her. She turned on the light that hung in
the closet. Boxes--pasteboard boxes--each one bearing a cryptic
pencilling on the end that stared out at you. "Drp Stud Win," said one;
"Sum Slp Cov Bedrm," another; "Toil. Set & Pic Frms."
Mrs. Brewster turned to her husband, almost shamefacedly, and yet with a
little air of defiance. "It--I don't know--it made me--not homesick,
Hosey. Not homesick, exactly; but--well, I guess I'm not the only woman
with a walnut streak in her modern make-up. Here's the woman--she came
to the door with her hat on, and yet--"
Truth--blinding, white-hot truth--burst in upon him. "Mother," he
said--and he stood up, suddenly robust, virile, alert--"mother, let's go
home."