Old lady Mandle was a queen. Her demesne, undisputed, was a six-room
flat on South Park Avenue, Chicago. Her faithful servitress was Anna, an
ancient person of Polish nativity, bad teeth, and a cunning hand at
cookery. Not so cunning, however, but that old lady Mandle's was more
artful still in such matters as meat-soups, broad noodles, fish with egg
sauce, and the like. As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous,
admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs.
Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And
the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo.
Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a
spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady. Bridling and
wagging her white head she admitted her pampered state. It was less an
admission than a boast. Her son Hugo had spoiled her. This, too, she
acknowledged. "My son Hugo spoils me," she would say, and there was no
proper humbleness in her voice. Though he was her only son she never
spoke of him merely as "Hugo," or "My son," but always as "My son
Hugo." She rolled the three words on her tongue as though they were
delicious morsels from which she would extract all possible savour and
sweetness. And when she did this you could almost hear the click of the
stiffening spines of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. For
they envied her her son Hugo, and resented him as only three old ladies
could who were living, tolerated and dependent, with their married sons
and their sons' wives.
Any pleasant summer afternoon at four o'clock you might have seen Mrs.
Mandle holding court. The four old women sat, a decent black silk row,
on a shady bench in Washington Park (near the refectory and afternoon
coffee). Three of them complained about their daughters-in-law. One of
them bragged about her son. Adjective crowding adjective, pride in her
voice, majesty in her mien, she bragged about my son Hugo.
My son Hugo had no wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no
thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine
about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It
may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his
thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so as to form
a tonsure. Hugo Mandle, kindly, generous, shrewd, spoiled his old
mother in the way in which women of seventy, whose middle life has been
hard, like to be spoiled. First of all, of course, she reigned unchecked
over the South Park Avenue flat. She quarrelled wholesomely and
regularly with Polish Anna. Alternately she threatened Anna with
dismissal and Anna threatened Ma Mandle with impending departure. This
had been going on, comfortably, for fifteen years. Ma Mandle held the
purse and her son filled it. Hugo paid everything from the rent to the
iceman, and this without once making his mother feel a beneficiary. She
possessed an infinitesimal income of her own, left her out of the ruins
of her dead husband's money, but this Hugo always waved aside did she
essay to pay for her own movie ticket or an ice cream soda. "Now, now!
None of that, Ma. Your money's no good to-night."
When he returned from a New York business trip he usually brought her
two gifts, one practical, the other absurd. She kissed him for the first
and scolded him for the second, but it was the absurdity, fashioned of
lace, or silk, or fragile stuff, that she pridefully displayed to her
friends.
"Look what my son Hugo brought me. I should wear a thing like that in my
old days. But it's beautiful anyway, h'm? He's got taste, my son Hugo."
In the cool of the evening you saw them taking a slow and solemn walk
together, his hand on her arm. He surprised her with matinée tickets in
pairs, telling her to treat one of her friends. On Anna's absent
Thursdays he always offered to take dinner downtown. He brought her
pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon
which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her
cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that
she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was
a spoiled old lady.
At half-past one she always prepared to take her nap in the quiet of her
neat flat. She would select a plump, after-lunch chocolate from the box
in her left-hand bureau drawer, take off her shoes, and settle her old
frame in comfort. No noisy grandchildren to disturb her rest. No
fault-finding daughter-in-law to bustle her out of the way. The sounds
that Anna made, moving about in the kitchen at the far end of the long
hall, were the subdued homely swishings and brushings that lulled and
soothed rather than irritated. At half-past two she rose, refreshed,
dressed herself in her dotted swiss with its rows of val, or in black
silk, modish both. She was, in fact, a modish old lady as were her three
friends. They were not the ultra-modern type of old lady who at sixty
apes sixteen. They were neat and rather tart-tongued septuagenarians,
guiltless of artifice. Their soft white hair was dressed neatly and
craftily so as to conceal the thinning spots that revealed the pink
scalp beneath. Their corsets and their stomachs were too high, perhaps,
for fashion, and their heavy brooches and chains and rings appeared
clumsy when compared to the hoar-frost tracery of the platinumsmith's
exquisite art. But their skirts had pleats when pleated skirts were
worn, and their sleeves were snug when snug sleeves were decreed. They
were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule,
scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at
bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle
triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three
was imitation.
So there they sat on a park bench in the pleasant afternoon air, filling
their lives with emptiness. They had married, and brought children into
the world; sacrificed for them, managed a household, been widowed. They
represented magnificent achievement, those four old women, though they
themselves did not know it. They had come up the long hill, reached its
apex, and come down. Their journey was over and yet they sat by the
roadside. They knew that which could have helped younger travellers
over the next hill, but those fleet-footed ones pressed on, wanting none
of their wisdom. Ma Mandle alone still moved. She still queened it over
her own household; she alone still had the delightful task of making a
man comfortable. If the world passed them by as they sat there it did
not pass unscathed. Their shrewd old eyes regarded the panorama,
undeceived. They did not try to keep up with the procession, but they
derived a sly amusement and entertainment from their observation of the
modes and manners of this amazing day and age. Perhaps it was well that
this plump matron in the over-tight skirt or that miss mincing on
four-inch heels could not hear the caustic comment of the white-haired
four sitting so mildly on the bench at the side of the path.
Their talk, stray as it might, always came back to two subjects. They
seemed never to tire of them. Three talked of their daughters-in-law,
and bitterness rasped their throats. One talked of her son, and her
voice was unctuous with pride.
"My son's wife--" one of the three would begin. There was something
terribly significant in the mock respect with which she uttered the
title.
"If I had ever thought," Mrs. Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if
I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to
depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead."
"You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked
tones from Mrs. Mandle.
"A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than
nothing. I'm in the way. I don't interfere in that household. I see
enough, and I hear enough, but I say nothing. My son's wife, she says it
all."
A silence, thoughtful, brooding. Then, from Mrs. Wormser: "What good do
you have of your children? They grow up, and what do you have of them?"
More shaking of heads, and a dark murmur about the advisability of an
Old People's Home as a refuge. Then:
"My son Hugo said only yesterday, 'Ma,' he said, 'when it comes to
housekeeping you could teach them all something, believe me. Why,' he
says, 'if I was to try and get a cup of coffee like this in a
restaurant--well, you couldn't get it in a restaurant, that's all. You
couldn't get it in any hotel, Michigan Avenue or I don't care where.'"
Goaded, Mrs. Lamb would look up from her knitting. "Mark my words, he'll
marry yet." She was a sallow, lively woman, her hair still markedly
streaked with black. Her rheumatism-twisted fingers were always
grotesquely busy with some handiwork, and the finished product was a
marvel of perfection.
Mrs. Wormser, plump, placid, agreed. "That's the kind always marries
late. And they get it the worst. Say, my son was no spring chicken,
either, when he married. And you would think the sun rises and sets in
his wife. Well, I suppose it's only natural. But you wait."
"Some girl is going to have a snap." Mrs. Brunswick, eager, peering, a
trifle vindictive, offered final opinion. "The girls aren't going to let
a boy like your Hugo get away. Not nowadays, the way they run after them
like crazy. All they think about is dress and a good time."
The three smiled grimly. Ma Mandle smiled, too, a little nervously, her
fingers creasing and uncreasing a fold of her black silk skirt as she
made airy answer: "If I've said once I've said a million times to my son
Hugo, 'Hugo, why don't you pick out some nice girl and settle down? I
won't be here always.' And he says, 'Getting tired of me, are you, Ma? I
guess maybe you're looking for a younger fellow.' Only last night I
said, at the table, 'Hugo, when are you going to get married?' And he
laughed. 'When I find somebody that can cook dumplings like these. Pass
me another, Ma'."
"That's all very well," said Mrs. Wormser.
"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud."
"Oh, a man of forty isn't such a--"
"He's just like a man of twenty-five--only worse."
Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son
Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?"
They would proceed solemnly and eagerly to the columned coolness of the
park refectory where they would drink their thick, creamy coffee. They
never knew, perhaps, how keenly they counted on that cup of coffee, or
how hungrily they drank it. Their minds, unconsciously, were definitely
fixed on the four-o'clock drink that stimulated the old nerves.
Life had not always been so plumply upholstered for old lady Mandle. She
had known its sharp corners and cruel edges. At twenty-three, a strong,
healthy, fun-loving girl, she had married Herman Mandle, a dour man
twenty-two years her senior. In their twenty-five years of married life
together Hattie Mandle never had had a five-cent piece that she could
call her own. Her husband was reputed to be wealthy, and probably was,
according to the standards of that day. There were three children: Etta,
the oldest; a second child, a girl, who died; and Hugo. Her husband's
miserliness, and the grind of the planning, scheming, and contriving
necessary to clothe and feed her two children would have crushed the
spirit of many women. But hard and glum as her old husband was he never
quite succeeded in subduing her courage or her love of fun. The habit of
heart-breaking economy clung to her, however, even when days of plenty
became hers. It showed in little hoarding ways: in the saving of burned
matches, of bits of ribbon, of scraps of food, of the very furniture and
linen, as though, when these were gone, no more would follow.
Ten years after her marriage her husband retired from active business.
He busied himself now with his real estate, with mysterious papers,
documents, agents. He was forever poking around the house at hours when
a household should be manless, grumbling about the waste where there was
none, peering into bread boxes, prying into corners never meant for
masculine eyes. Etta, the girl, was like him, sharp-nosed, ferret-faced,
stingy. The mother and the boy turned to each other. In a wordless way
they grew very close, those two. It was as if they were silently matched
against the father and daughter.
It was a queer household, brooding, sinister, like something created in
a Brontë brain. The two children were twenty-four and twenty-two when
the financial avalanche of '93 thundered across the continent sweeping
Herman Handle, a mere speck, into the débris. Stocks and bonds and real
estate became paper, with paper value. He clawed about with frantic,
clutching fingers but his voice was lost in the shrieks of thousands
more hopelessly hurt. You saw him sitting for hours together with a
black tin box in front of him, pawing over papers, scribbling down
figures, muttering. The bleak future that confronted them had little of
terror for Hattie Mandle. It presented no contrast with the bleakness of
the past. On the day that she came upon him, his head fallen at a
curious angle against the black tin box, his hands, asprawl, clutching
the papers that strewed the table, she was appalled, not at what she
found, but at the leap her heart gave at what she found. Herman Handle's
sudden death was one of the least of the tragedies that trailed in the
wake of the devastating panic.
Thus it was that Hugo Handle, at twenty-three, became the head of a
household. He did not need to seek work. From the time he was seventeen
he had been employed in a large china-importing house, starting as a
stock boy. Brought up under the harsh circumstances of Hugo's youth, a
boy becomes food for the reformatory or takes on the seriousness and
responsibility of middle age. In Hugo's case the second was true. From
his father he had inherited a mathematical mind and a sense of material
values. From his mother, a certain patience and courage, though he never
attained her iron indomitability.
It had been a terrific struggle. His salary at twenty-three was most
modest, but he was getting on. He intended to be a buyer, some day, and
take trips abroad to the great Austrian and French and English china
houses.
The day after the funeral he said to his mother, "Well, now we've got to
get Etta married. But married well. Somebody who'll take care of her."
"You're a good son, Hugo," Mrs. Handle had said.
Hugo shook his head. "It isn't that. If she's comfortable and happy--or
as happy as she knows how to be--she'll never come back. That's what I
want. There's debts to pay, too. But I guess we'll get along."
They did get along, but at snail's pace. There followed five years of
economy so rigid as to make the past seem profligate. Etta, the
acid-tongued, the ferret-faced, was not the sort to go off without the
impetus of a dowry. The man for Etta, the shrew, must be kindly,
long-suffering, subdued--and in need of a start. He was. They managed a
very decent trousseau and the miracle of five thousand dollars in cash.
Every stitch in the trousseau and every penny in the dowry represented
incredible sacrifice and self-denial on the part of mother and brother.
Etta went off to her new home in Pittsburg with her husband. She had
expressed thanks for nothing and had bickered with her mother to the
last, but even Hugo knew that her suit and hat and gloves and shoes were
right. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement
colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes.
The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound
steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A
new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle.
Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle
side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them
a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a
man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight,
but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest
against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the
cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness)
in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar
smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play
that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would
tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key,
in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and
son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo
kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she
looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat
her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough
thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill
that her husband's withered kisses had never given her.
Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a
comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit
of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady
Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend
freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his
savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a
time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She
and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household.
When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma
Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch
of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his
money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household
capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometimes Hugo used to
protest, aghast at some petty act of parsimony.
"But, Ma, what do you want to scrimp like that for! You're the worst
tightwad I ever saw. Here, take this ten and blow it. You're worse than
the squirrels in the park, darned if you ain't!"
She couldn't resist the ten. Neither could she resist showing it, next
day, to Mrs. Brunswick, Mrs. Lamb, and Mrs. Wormser. "How my son Hugo
spoils me! He takes out a ten-dollar bill, and he stuffs it into my hand
and says 'Ma, you're the worst tightwad I ever saw.'" She laughed
contentedly. But she did not blow the ten. As she grew older Hugo
regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties,
articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with
age, shrewd though she naturally was.
It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an
evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full
hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged.
"Everybody'll be asking who the old man is you're out with. First thing
I know I'll have a police-woman after me for going around with a
chicken."
"Don't talk foolishness." But she would flush like a bride. She liked a
musical comedy with a lot of girls in it and a good-looking tenor. Next
day you would hear her humming the catch-tune in an airy falsetto.
Sometimes she wondered about him. She was, after all, a rather wise old
lady, and she knew something of men. She had a secret horror of his
becoming what she called fast.
"Why don't you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman
like me, Hugo? Any girl would be only too glad." But in her heart was a
dread. She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick.
So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South
Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life.
And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does.
Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might
have taken warning. That was because he had said so little. She
remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken
admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha. He did not often speak of
business.
"She buys like a man," he had said at dinner. "I never saw anything like
it. Knew what she wanted and got it. She bought all my best numbers at
rock bottom. I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour. And no fuss.
Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she
turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for
novelties."
Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended.
Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner.
Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal,
too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly
during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of
angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The
following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in
Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals.
Usually he praised this dish, or that.
"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?"
"'S all right." And declined a second piece.
The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped
his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before
her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said.