Big Money (15 page)

Miss Parsons sighed. “Well, Mrs. French, we'll hate to lose you but it certainly is best for the child. There's a better element in the schools
there.” Miss Parsons lifted her teacup with her little finger crooked and let it down again with a dry click in the saucer.

Mary sat watching them from the little tapestry stool by the fireplace. “I hate to admit it,” Miss Parsons went on, “because I was born and bred here, but Trinidad's no place to bring up a sweet clean little American girl.”

Granpa Wilkins had died that spring in Denver and Mother was beneficiary of his life insurance so she carried off things with a high hand. Poor Daddy hated to leave Trinidad and they hardly even spoke without making Mary go and read in the library while they quarreled over the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Mary would sit with an old red embossedleather
Ivanhoe
in her hand and listen to their bitter wrangling voices coming through the board partition. “You've ruined my life and now I'm not going to let you ruin the child's,” Mother would yell in that mean voice that made Mary feel so awful and Mary would sit there crying over the book until she got started reading again and after a couple of pages had forgotten everything except the yeomen in Lincoln green and the knights on horseback and the castles. That summer instead of going camping in Yellowstone like Daddy had planned they moved to Colorado Springs.

At Colorado Springs they stayed first in a boardinghouse and then when the furniture came they moved to the green shingled bungalow where they were going to live that was set way back from the red gravel road in a scrawny lawn among tall poplartrees.

In the long grass Mary found the scaled remains of a croquetset. While Daddy and Mother were fussing about the furnishings that the men were moving in from a wagon, she ran around with a broken mallet slamming at the old cracked balls that hardly had any paint left on their red and green and yellow and blue bands. When Daddy came out of the house looking tired and grey with his hair untidy over his forehead she ran up to him waving the mallet and wanted him to play croquet. “No time for games now,” he said.

Mary burst out crying and he lifted her on his shoulder and carriedher round the back porch and showed her how by climbing on the roof of the little toolhouse behind the kitchen door you could see the mesa and beyond, behind a tattered fringe of racing cheesecloth clouds, the blue sawtooth ranges piling up to the towering smooth mass of mountains where Pikes Peak was. “We'll go up there
someday on the cogwheel railroad,” he said in his warm cozy voice close to her ear. The mountains looked so far away and the speed of the clouds made her feel dizzy. “Just you and me,” he said, “but you mustn't ever cry . . . it'll make the children tease you in school, Mary.”

In September she had to go to highschool. It was awful going to a new school where she didn't have any friends. The girls seemed so welldressed and stuck up in the firstyear high. Going through the corridors hearing the other girls talk about parties and the Country Club and sets of tennis and summer hotels and automobiles and friends in finishingschools in the East, Mary, with her glasses and the band to straighten her teeth Mother had had the dentist put on, that made her lisp a little, and her freckles and her hair that wasn't red or blond but just sandy, felt a miserable foreigner like the smelly bawling miners' kids back in Trinidad.

She liked the boys better. A redheaded boy grinned at her sometimes. At least they let her alone. She did well in her classes and thought the teachers were lovely. In English they read
Ramona
and one day Mary, scared to death all alone, went to the cemetery to see the grave of Helen Hunt Jackson. It was beautifully sad that spring afternoon in Evergreen Cemetery. When she grew up, she decided, she was going to be like Helen Hunt Jackson.

They had a Swedish girl named Anna to do the housework and Mother and Daddy were hardly ever home when she came back from school. Daddy had an office downtown in a new officebuilding and Mother was always busy with churchwork or at the library reading up for papers she delivered at the women's clubs. Half the time Mary had her supper all alone reading a book or doing her homework. Then she would go out in the kitchen and help Anna tidy up and try to keep her from going home and leaving her alone in the house. When she heard the front door opening she would run out breathless. Usually it was only Mother, but sometimes it was Daddy with his cigar and his tired look and his clothes smelling of tobacco and iodiform and carbolic and maybe she could get him to sit on her bed before she went to sleep to tell her stories about the old days and miners and prospectors and the war between the sheepherders and the ranchers.

At highschool Mary's best friend was Ada Cohn whose father was a prominent Chicago lawyer who had had to come out for his health.
Mother did everything she could to keep her from going to the Cohns' and used to have mean arguments with Daddy about how it was only on account of his being so shiftless that her only daughter was reduced to going around with Jews and every Tom Dick and Harry, and why didn't he join the Country Club and what was the use of her struggling to get a position for him among the better element by church activities and women's clubs and communitychest work if he went on being just a poor man's doctor and was seen loafing around with all the scum in poolrooms and worse places for all she knew instead of working up a handsome practice in a city where there were so many wealthy sick people; wasn't it to get away from all that sort of thing they'd left Trinidad? “But, Hilda,” Daddy would say, “be reasonable. It's on account of Mary's being a friend of the Cohns' that they've given me their practice. They are very nice kindly people.” Mother would stare straight at him and hissed through her teeth: “Oh, if you only had a tiny bit of ambition.”

Mary would run away from the table in tears and throw herself on her bed with a book and lie there listening to their voices raised and then Daddy's heavy slow step and the slam of the door and the sound of him cranking the car to start off on his calls again. Often she lay there with her teeth clenched wishing if Mother would only die and leave her and Daddy living alone quietly together. A cold shudder would go through her at the thought of how awful it was to have thoughts like that, and she'd start reading, hardly able to see the printed page through her tears at first but gradually forgetting herself in the story in the book.

One thing that Mother and Daddy agreed about was that they wanted Mary to go to a really good eastern college. The year before she graduated from highschool Mary had passed all the College Board exams except solid geometry. She was crazy to go.

Except for a few days camping every summer with Daddy and one summer month she spent answering the phone and making out the cards of the patients and keeping his accounts and sending out his bills at his office, she hated it in Colorado Springs. Her only boyfriend was a young fellow with a clubfoot named Joe Denny, the son of a saloonkeeper in Colorado City. He was working his way through Colorado College. He was a bitter slowspoken towheaded boy with a sharp jaw, a wizard in math. He hated liquor and John D. Rockefeller more than anything in the world. She and Joe and Ada would go out
on picnics Sunday to the Garden of the Gods or Austin Bluffs or one of the canyons and read poetry together. Their favorites were
The Hound of Heaven
and
The City of Dreadful Night.
Joe thrilled the girls one day standing on a flat rock above the little fire they were frying their bacon over and reciting
The Man with the Hoe.
At first they thought he'd written it himself.

When they got in, feeling sunburned and happy after a day in the open, Mary would so wish she could take her friends home the way Ada did. The Cohns were kind and jolly and always asked everybody to stay to dinner in spite of the fact that poor Mr. Cohn was a very sick man. But Mary didn't dare take anybody home to her house for fear Mother would be rude to them, or that there'd be one of those yelling matches that started up all the time between Mother and Daddy. The summer before she went to Vassar Mother and Daddy weren't speaking at all after a terrible argument when Daddy said one day at supper that he was going to vote for Eugene V. Debs in November.

At Vassar the girls she knew were better dressed than she was and had uppity finishingschool manners, but for the first time in her life she was popular. The instructors liked her because she was neat and serious and downright about everything and the girls said she was as homely as a mud fence but a darling.

It was all spoiled the second year when Ada came to Vassar. Ada was her oldest friend and Mary loved her dearly, so she was horrified to catch herself wishing Ada hadn't come. Ada had gotten so lush and Jewish and noisy, and her clothes were too expensive and never just right. They roomed together and Ada bought most of Mary's clothes and books for her because her allowance was so tiny. After Ada came Mary wasn't popular the way she'd been, and the most successful girls shied off from her. Mary and Ada majored in sociology and said they were going to be socialworkers.

When Mary was a junior Mother went to Reno and got a divorce from Daddy, giving intemperance and mental cruelty as the cause. It had never occurred to Mary that poor Daddy drank. She cried and cried when she read about it in a newspaper clipping marked in red pencil some nameless wellwisher sent her from Colorado Springs. She burned the clipping in the fireplace so that Ada shouldn't see it, and when Ada asked her why her eyes were so red said it was because it had made her cry to read about all those poor soldiers being killed
in the war in Europe. It made her feel awful having told Ada a lie and she lay awake all night worrying about it.

The next summer the two of them got jobs doing settlementwork at Hull House in Chicago. Chicago was scary and poor Ada Cohn couldn't keep on with the work and went up to Michigan to have a nervous breakdown; it was so awful the way poor people lived and the cracked red knuckles of the women who took in washing and the scabby heads of the little children and the clatter and the gritty wind on South Halstead Street and the stench of the stockyards; but it made Mary feel like years back in Trinidad when she was a little girl, the way she'd felt the summer she worked in Daddy's office.

When she went back to Colorado Springs for two weeks before Vassar opened she found Mother staying in style in a small suite at the Broadmoor. Mother had inherited a block of stocks in American Smelting and Refining when Uncle Henry was killed in a streetcar accident in Denver, and had an income of twenty thousand a year. She had become a great bridgeplayer and was going round the country speaking at women's clubs against votes for women. She spoke of Daddy in a sweet cold acid voice as “your poor dear father,” and told Mary she must dress better and stop wearing those awful spectacles. Mary wouldn't take any money from her mother because she said nobody had a right to money they hadn't earned, but she did let her fit her out with a new tailored tweed suit and a plain afternoondress with a lace collar and cuffs. She got along better with her mother now, but there was always a cold feeling of strain between them.

Mother said she didn't know where Daddy was living, so Mary had to go down to the office to see him. The office was dingier than she remembered it, and full of patients, downandoutlooking people mostly, and it was an hour before he could get away to take her to lunch.

They ate perched on stools at the counter of the little lunchroom next door. Daddy's hair was almost white now and his face was terribly lined and there were big grey pouches under his eyes. Mary got a lump in her throat every time she looked at him. “Oh, Daddy, you ought to take a rest.” “I know . . . I ought to get out of the altitude for a while. The old pump isn't so good as it was.” “Daddy, why don't you come east at Christmas?” “Maybe I will if I can raise the kale and get somebody to take over my practice for a month.” She loved the deep bass of his voice so. “It would do you so much good. . . . It's so long since we had a trip together.”

It was late. There was nobody in the lunchroom except the frozenmouthed waitress who was eating her own lunch at a table in the back. The big tiredfaced clock over the coffeeurn was ticking loud in the pauses of Daddy's slow talk.

“I never expected to neglect my own little girl . . . you know how it is . . . that's what I've done. . . . How's your mother?” “Oh, Mother's on top of the world,” she said with a laugh that sounded tinny in her ears. She was working to put Daddy at his ease, like a charity case. “Oh, well, that's all over now. . . . I was never the proper husband for her,” said Daddy.

Mary felt her eyes fill with tears. “Daddy, after I've graduated will you let me take over your office? That awful Miss Hylan is so slipshod. . . .” “Oh, you'll have better things to do. It's always a surprise to me how many people pay their bills anyway . . . I don't pay mine.” “Daddy, I'm going to have to take you in hand.” “I reckon you will, daughter . . . your settlement work is just trainin' for the reform of the old man, eh?” She felt herself blushing.

She'd hardly settled down to being with him when he had to rush off to see a woman who had been in labor five days and hadn't had her baby yet. She hated going back to the Broadmoor and the bellhops in monkeyjackets and the overdressed old hens sitting in the lobby. That evening Joe Denny called up to see if he could take her out for a drive. Mother was busy at bridge so she slipped out without saying anything to her and met him on the hotel porch. She had on her new dress and had taken off her glasses and put them in her little bag. Joe was all a blur to her but she could make out that he looked well and prosperous and was driving a new little Ford roadster.

“Why, Mary French,” he said, “why, if you haven't gone and got goodlooking on me. . . . I guess there's no chance now for a guy like me.”