"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about
her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll
love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world.
Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look
so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?"
"But who--?"
"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and
strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home
an--'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says--"
Ad lib.
They were married the following month.
Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment
farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her
mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of
grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up,
miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were
swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna,
with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her
gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the
afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat
Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never
failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day
scrubber.
But Lil. Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not. A plump,
voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin,
bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd
business head. Hugo's devotion amounted to worship.
He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany
front bedroom. Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps.
She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected.
Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a
concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for
its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade. Everything about her
shone and glittered. Her pink nails were like polished coral. Her hair
gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place. Her skin was
clear and smooth as a baby's. Her hands were plump and white. She was
always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would
emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever. Lil knew when camisoles
were edged with filet, and when with Irish. Instinctively she sensed
when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard. The contents of her
scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look
as if they might have been eaten as something soufflé.
"How do I look in it, Hugo? Do you like it?" was a question that rose
daily to her lips. A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligée. Not that
she was unduly extravagant. She knew values, and profited by her
knowledge.
"Le's see. Turn around. It looks great on you. Yep. That's all right."
He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women's clothes and to prove
it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in
a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that. She had her
own ideas on clothes. He turned to jewellery. On Lil's silken bosom
reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a
fish-knife. She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and
on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that
its utilitarian dial was almost lost.
It wasn't a one-sided devotion, however. Lil knew much about men, and
she had an instinct for making them comfortable. It is a gift that makes
up for myriad minor shortcomings. She had a way of laying his clean
things out on the bed--fresh linen, clean white socks (Hugo was addicted
to white socks and tan, low-cut shoes), silk shirt, immaculate
handkerchief. When he came in at the end of a hard day downtown--hot,
fagged, sticky--she saw to it that the bathroom was his own for an hour
so that he could bathe, shave, powder, dress, and emerge refreshed to
eat his good dinner in comfort. Lil was always waiting for him cool,
interested, sweet-smelling.
When she said, "How's business, lover?" she really wanted to know. More
than that, when he told her she understood, having herself been so long
in the game. She gave him shrewd advice, too, so shrewdly administered
that he never realized he had been advised, and so, man-like, could
never resent it.
Ma Mandle's reign was over.
To Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser Ma Mandle lied
magnificently. Their eager, merciless questions pierced her like knives,
but she made placid answer: "Young folks are young folks. They do things
different. I got my way. My son's wife has got hers." Their quick ears
caught the familiar phrase.
"It's hard, just the same," Mrs. Wormser insisted, "after you've been
boss all these years to have somebody else step in and shove you out of
the way. Don't I know!"
"I'm glad to have a little rest. Marketing and housekeeping nowadays is
no snap, with the prices what they are. Anybody that wants the pleasure
is welcome."
But they knew, the three. There was, in Ma Mandle's tone, a hollow
pretence that deceived no one. They knew, and she knew that they knew.
She was even as they were, a drinker of the hemlock cup, an eater of
ashes.
Hugo Mandle was happier and more comfortable than he had ever been in
his life. It wasn't merely his love for Lil, and her love for him that
made him happy. Lil set a good table, though perhaps it was not as
bounteous as his mother's had been. His food, somehow, seemed to agree
with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her
provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure.
She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo
agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma
Mandle fought every ounce of it.
"You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat! How can a man work and not eat? I
never heard of such a thing. Fads!"
But these were purely physical things. It was a certain mental
relaxation that Hugo enjoyed, though he did not definitely know it. He
only knew that Lil seemed, somehow, to understand. For years his mother
had trailed after him, putting away things that he wanted left out,
tidying that which he preferred left in seeming disorder. Lil seemed
miraculously to understand about those things. He liked, for example, a
certain grimy, gritty old rag with which he was wont to polish his golf
clubs. It was caked with dirt, and most disreputable, but it was of just
the right material, or weight, or size, or something, and he had for it
the unreasoning affection that a child has for a tattered rag doll among
a whole family of golden-haired, blue-eyed beauties. Ma Mandle, tidying
up, used to throw away that rag in horror. Sometimes he would rescue it,
crusted as it was with sand and mud and scouring dust. Sometimes he
would have to train in a new rag, and it was never as good as the old.
Lil understood about that rag, and approved of it. For that matter, she
had a rag of her own which she used to remove cold cream from her face
and throat. It was a clean enough bit of soft cloth to start with, but
she clung to it as an actress often does, until it was smeared with the
pink of makeup and the black of Chicago soot. She used to search remote
corners of it for an inch of unused, unsmeared space. Lil knew about
not talking when you wanted to read the paper, too. Ma Mandle, at
breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the
milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that
had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to
say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had. Now
it was Lil who listened patiently to Ma Mandle's small grievances, and
Hugo was left free to peruse the head-lines.
If you had told Ma Mandle that she was doing her best to ruin the life
of the one person she loved best in all the world she would have told
you that you were insane. If you had told her that she was jealous she
would have denied it, furiously. But both were true.
When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well.
"You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything,"
she would say, unreasonably.
"Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?"
If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked.
Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim,
well-shod, immaculate. Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat
but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?"
"Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked
over."
"Oh--to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy."
In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the
marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly. "Oh, no," she had said.
"This is your household now."
But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen
table after delivery. She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a
head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump
chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with
meaning.
Ma Mandle disapproved of many things. Of Lil's silken, lacy lingerie; of
her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness. Lil wore the
fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and
she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the
result of leisure and of rich food. She was addicted to afternoon
parties at the homes of married women of her own age and
station--pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too
much. They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery
biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes
of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a
heavy, rich dessert. When she came home she ate nothing.
"I couldn't eat a bite of dinner," she would say. "Let me tell you what
we had." She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked
teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed
her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the
sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm. She kept her
clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent
life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing
her face had not coarsened its texture.
Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between
the two women. He was very happy. He only knew that Lil understood about
cigar ashes; that she didn't mind if a pillow wasn't plumped and patted
after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him
about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about
Polish Anna. Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always
treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at
ordinary times. Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling
of cleanliness. Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her
house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle's steady efforts
to block them. Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel. She only
thought that she was protecting her son's interests. She did not know
that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which
caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should
not do.
Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening. They liked the
theatre, restaurant life, gayety. Hugo learned to dance and became
marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man.
"Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say.
"Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some
night life."
"I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home.
You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along."
That being true, they vowed it was not, and renewed their urging. In the
end she went, grudgingly. But her old eyes would droop; the late supper
would disagree with her; the noise, the music, the laughter, and shrill
talk bewildered her. She did not understand the banter, and resented
it.
Next day, in the park, she would boast of her life of gayety to the
vaguely suspicious three.
Later she refused to go out with them. She stayed in her room a good
deal, fussing about, arranging bureau drawers already geometrically
precise, winding endless old ribbons, ripping the trimming off hats long
passé and re-trimming them with odds and ends and scraps of feathers and
flowers.
Hugo and Lil used to ask her to go with them to the movies, but they
liked the second show at eight-thirty while she preferred the earlier
one at seven. She grew sleepy early, though she often lay awake for
hours after composing herself for sleep. She would watch the picture
absorbedly, but when she stepped, blinking, into the bright glare of
Fifty-third Street, she always had a sense of let-down, of depression.
A wise old lady of seventy, who could not apply her wisdom for her own
good. A rather lonely old lady, with hardening arteries and a dilating
heart. An increasingly fault-finding old lady. Even Hugo began to notice
it. She would wait for him to come home and then, motioning him
mysteriously into her own room, would pour a tale of fancied insult into
his ear.
"I ran a household and brought up a family before she was born. I don't
have to be told what's what. I may be an old woman but I'm not so old
that I can sit and let my own son be made a fool of. One girl isn't
enough, she's got to have a wash woman. And now a wash woman isn't
enough she's got to have a woman to clean one day a week."
An hour later, from the front bedroom, where Hugo was dressing, would
come the low murmur of conversation. Lil had reached the complaining
point, goaded by much repetition.
The attitude of the two women distressed and bewildered Hugo. He was a
simple soul, and this was a complex situation. His mind leaped from
mother to wife, and back again, joltingly. After all, one woman at a
time is all that any man can handle successfully.
"What's got into you women folks!" he would say. "Always quarrelling.
Why can't you get along."
One night after dinner Lil said, quite innocently, "Mother, we haven't a
decent picture of you. Why don't you have one taken? In your black
lace."
Old lady Mandle broke into sudden fury. "I guess you think I'm going to
die! A picture to put on the piano after I'm gone, huh? 'That's my dear
mother that's gone.' Well, I don't have any picture taken. You can think
of me the way I was when I was alive."
The thing grew and swelled and took on bitterness as it progressed.
Lil's face grew strangely flushed and little veins stood out on her
temples. All the pent-up bitterness that had been seething in Ma
Mandle's mind broke bounds now, and welled to her lips. Accusation,
denial; vituperation, retort.
"You'll be happy when I'm gone."
"If I am it's your fault."
"It's the ones that are used to nothing that always want the most. They
don't know where to stop. When you were working in Omaha--"
"The salary I gave up to marry your son was more money than you ever
saw."
And through it all, like a leit-motiv, ran Hugo's attempt at
pacification: "Now, Ma! Don't, Lil. You'll only excite yourself. What's
got into you two women?"
It was after dinner. In the end Ma Mandle slammed out of the house,
hatless. Her old legs were trembling. Her hands shook. It was a hot June
night. She felt as if she were burning up. In her frantic mind there was
even thought of self-destruction. There were thousands of motor cars
streaming by. The glare of their lamps and the smell of the gasoline
blinded and stifled her. Once, at a crossing, she almost stumbled in
front of an on-rushing car. The curses of the startled driver sounded
in her terrified ears after she had made the opposite curb in a frantic
bound. She walked on and on for what seemed to her to be a long time,
with plodding, heavy step. She was not conscious of being tired. She
came to a park bench and sat down, feeling very abused, and lonely and
agonized. This was what she had come to in her old days. It was for this
you bore children, and brought them up and sacrificed for them. How
right they were--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Useless.
Unconsidered. In the way.
By degrees she grew calmer. Her brain cooled as her fevered old body
lost the heat of anger. Lil had looked kind of sick. Perhaps ... and how
worried Hugo had looked....
Feeling suddenly impelled she got up from the bench and started toward
home. Her walk, which had seemed interminable, had really lasted
scarcely more than half an hour. She had sat in the park scarcely
fifteen minutes. Altogether her flight had been, perhaps, an hour in
duration.
She had her latchkey in her pocket. She opened the door softly. The
place was in darkness. Voices from the front bedroom, and the sound of
someone sobbing, as though spent. Old lady Mandle's face hardened again.
The door of the front bedroom was closed. Plotting against her! She
crouched there in the hall, listening. Lil's voice, hoarse with sobs.
"I've tried and tried. But she hates me. Nothing I do suits her. If it
wasn't for the baby coming sometimes I think I'd--"
"You're just nervous and excited, Lil. It'll come out all right. She's
an old lady--"
"I know it. I know it. I've said that a million times in the last year
and a half. But that doesn't excuse everything, does it? Is that any
reason why she should spoil our lives? It isn't fair. It isn't fair!"
"Sh! Don't cry like that, dear. Don't! You'll only make yourself sick."
Her sobs again, racking, choking, and the gentle murmur of his soothing
endearments. Then, unexpectedly, a little, high-pitched laugh through
the tears.
"No, I'm not hysterical. I--it just struck me funny. I was just
wondering if I might be like that. When I grow old, and my son marries,
maybe I'll think everything his wife does is wrong. I suppose if we love
them too much we really harm them. I suppose--"
"Oh, it's going to be a son, is it?"
"Yes."
Another silence. Then: "Come, dear. Bathe your poor eyes. You're all
worn out from crying. Why, sweetheart, I don't believe I ever saw you
cry before."
"I know it. I feel better now. I wish crying could make it all right.
I'm sorry. She's so old, dear. That's the trouble. They live in the past
and they expect us to live in the past with them. You were a good son to
her, Hughie. That's why you make such a wonderful husband. Too good,
maybe. You've spoiled us both, and now we both want all of you."
Hugo was silent a moment. He was not a quick-thinking man. "A husband
belongs to his wife," he said then, simply. "He's his mother's son by
accident of birth. But he's his wife's husband by choice, and
deliberately."
But she laughed again at that. "It isn't as easy as that, sweetheart. If
it was there'd be no jokes in the funny papers. My poor boy! And just
now, too, when you're so worried about business."
"Business'll be all right, Lil. Trade'll open up next winter. It's got
to. We've kept going on the Japanese and English stuff. But if the
French and Austrian factories start running we'll have a whirlwind year.
If it hadn't been for you this last year I don't know how I'd have stood
the strain. No importing, and the business just keeping its head above
water. But you were right, honey. We've weathered the worst of it now."
"I'm glad you didn't tell Mother about it. She'd have worried herself
sick. If she had known we both put every cent we had into the
business--"
"We'll get it back ten times over. You'll see."
The sound of footsteps. "I wonder where she went. She oughtn't to be out
alone. I'm kind of worried about her, Hugo. Don't you think you'd
better--"
Ma Mandle opened the front door and then slammed it, ostentatiously, as
though she had just come in.
"That you, Ma?" called Hugo.
He turned on the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic
little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began
to worry about you."
"I'm all right. I'm going to bed."
He made a clumsy, masculine pretence at heartiness. "Lil and I are going
over to the drug store for a soda, it's so hot. Come on along, Ma."
Lil joined him in the doorway of the bedroom. Her eyes were red-rimmed
behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled
bravely.
"Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off."
But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along,
you two."
That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone.
Something new, something gentle, something wise.
She went on down the hall to her room. She took off her clothes, and
hung them away, neatly. But once in her nightgown she did not get into
bed. She sat there, in the chair by the window. Old lady Mandle had
lived to be seventy and had acquired much wisdom. One cannot live to be
seventy without having experienced almost everything in life. But to
crystallize that experience of a long lifetime into terms that would
express the meaning of life--this she had never tried to do. She could
not do it now, for that matter. But she groped around, painfully, in her
mind. There had been herself and Hugo. And now Hugo's wife and the child
to be. They were the ones that counted, now. That was the law of life.
She did not put it into words. But something of this she thought as she
sat there in her plain white nightgown, her scant white locks pinned in
a neat knob at the top of her head. Selfishness. That was it. They
called it love, but it was selfishness. She must tell them about it
to-morrow--Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser. Only yesterday
Mrs. Brunswick had waxed bitter because her daughter-in-law had let a
moth get into her husband's winter suit.
"I never had a moth in my house!" Mrs. Brunswick had declared. "Never.
But nowadays housekeeping is nothing. A suit is ruined. What does my
son's wife care! I never had a moth in my house."
Ma Mandle chuckled to herself there in the darkness. "I bet she did. She
forgets. We all forget."
It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from
the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl.
Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare
feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a
line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room.
With a pin from the tray on the dresser she fastened the note to Lil's
pillow, high up, where she must see it the instant she turned on the
light. Then she scuttled down the hall to her room again.
She felt the heat terribly. She would sit by the window again. All the
blood in her body seemed to be pounding in her head ... pounding in her
head ... pounding....
At ten Hugo and Lil came in, softly. Hugo tiptoed down the hall, as was
his wont, and listened. The room was in darkness. "Sleeping, Ma?" he
whispered. He could not see the white-gowned figure sitting peacefully
by the window, and there was no answer. He tiptoed with painful
awkwardness up the hall again.
"She's asleep, all right. I didn't think she'd get to sleep so early on
a scorcher like this."
Lil turned on the light in her room. "It's too hot to sleep," she said.
She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper
pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read
it.
"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than
half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder.
"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in
the world."
A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished
reading them.