Big Money (16 page)

They drove slowly round the park for a while and then he parked the car in a spot of moonlight over a culvert. Down the little gully beyond the quakingaspens you could see the plains dark and shimmery stretching way off to the moonlit horizon. “How lovely,” she said. He turned his serious face with its pointed chin to hers and said stammering a little, “Mary, I've got to spit it out. . . . I want you and me to be engaged. . . . I'm going to Cornell to take an engineering course . . . scholarship. . . . When I get out I ought to be able to make fair money
inside of a couple of years and be able to support a wife. . . . It would make me awful happy . . . if you'd say maybe . . . if by that time . . . there wasn't anybody else. . . .” His voice dwindled away.

Mary had a glimpse of the sharp serious lines of his face in the moonlight. She couldn't look at him.

“Joe, I always felt we were friends like Ada and me. It spoils everything to talk like that. . . . When I get out of college I want to do socialservice work and I've got to take care of Daddy. . . . Please don't . . . anything like that makes me feel awful.”

He held his square hand out and they shook hands solemnly over the dashboard. “All right, sister, what you say goes,” he said and drove her back to the hotel without another word. She sat a long time on the porch looking out at the September moonlight feeling awful.

A few days later when she left to go back to school it was Joe who drove her to the station to take the train east because Mother had an important committeemeeting and Daddy had to be at the hospital. When they said goodby and shook hands he tapped her nervously on the shoulder a couple of times and acted like his throat was dry, but he didn't say anything more about getting engaged. Mary was so relieved.

On the train she read Ernest Poole's
The Harbor
and reread
The Jungle
and lay in the pullmanberth that night too excited to sleep, listening to the rumble of the wheels over the rails, the clatter of crossings, the faraway spooky wails of the locomotive, remembering the overdressed women putting on airs in the ladies' dressingroom who'd elbowed her away from the mirror and the heavyfaced businessmen snoring in their berths, thinking of the work there was to be done to make the country what it ought to be, the social conditions, the slums, the shanties with filthy tottering backhouses, the miners' children in grimy coats too big for them, the overworked women stooping over stoves, the youngsters struggling for an education in nightschools, hunger and unemployment and drink, and the police and the lawyers and the judges always ready to take it out on the weak; if the people in the pullmancars could only be made to understand how it was; if she sacrificed her life, like Daddy taking care of his patients night and day, maybe she, like Miss Addams . . .

She couldn't wait to begin. She couldn't stay in her berth. She got up and went and sat tingling in the empty dressingroom trying to
read
The Promise of American Life.
She read a few pages but she couldn't take in the meaning of the words; thoughts were racing across her mind like the tatters of cloud pouring through the pass and across the dark bulk of the mountains at home. She got cold and shivery and went back to her berth.

Crossing Chicago she suddenly told the taximan to drive her to Hull House. She had to tell Miss Addams how she felt. But when the taxi drew up to the curb in the midst of the familiar squalor of South Halstead Street and she saw two girls she knew standing under the stone porch talking, she suddenly lost her nerve and told the driver to go on to the station.

Back at Vassar that winter everything seemed awful. Ada had taken up music and was studying the violin and could think of nothing but getting down to New York for concerts. She said she was in love with Dr. Muck of the Boston Symphony and wouldn't talk about the war or pacifism or social work or anything like that. The world outside—the submarine campaign, the war, the election—was so vivid Mary couldn't keep her mind on her courses or on Ada's gabble about musical celebrities. She went to all the lectures about current events and social conditions.

The lecture that excited her most that winter was G. H. Barrow's lecture on “The Promise of Peace.” He was a tall thin man with bushy grey hair and a red face and a prominent adamsapple and luminous eyes that tended to start out of his head a little. He had a little stutter and a warm confidential manner when he talked. He seemed so nice somehow Mary felt sure he had been a workingman. He had red gnarled hands with long fingers and walked up and down the room with a sinewy stride taking off and putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. After the lecture he was at Mr. Hardwick's house and Mrs. Hardwick served lemonade and cocoa and sandwiches and the girls all gathered round and asked questions. He was shyer than on the platform but he talked beautifully about Labor's faith in Mr. Wilson and how Labor would demand peace and how the Mexican revolution (he'd just been to Mexico and had had all sorts of adventures there) was just a beginning. Labor was going to get on its feet all over the world and start cleaning up the mess the old order had made, not by violence but by peaceful methods, Wilsonian methods. That night when Mary got to bed she could still feel the taut appealing nervous tremble that came into Mr. Barrow's voice sometimes. It made her
crazy anxious to get out of this choky collegelife and out into the world. She'd never known time to drag so as it did that winter.

One slushy day of February thaw she'd gone back to the room to change her wet overshoes between classes when she found a yellow telegram under the door:
BETTER COME HOME FOR A WHILE YOUR MOTHER NOT VERY WELL.
It was signed
DADDY
. She was terribly worried but it was a relief to have an excuse to get away from college. She took a lot of books with her but she couldn't read on the train. She sat there too hot in the greenplush pullman with a book on her knees, staring out at the flat snowcovered fields edged with tangles of bare violet trees and the billboards and the shanties and redbrick falsefront stores along new concrete highways and towns of ramshackle frame houses sooty with factorysmoke and the shanties and the barns and the outhouses slowly turning as the train bored through the midwest, and thought of nothing.

Daddy met her at the station. His clothes looked even more rumpled than usual and he had a button off his overcoat. His face was full of new small fine wrinkles when he smiled. His eyes were redrimmed as if he hadn't slept for nights.

“It's all right, Mary,” he said. “I oughtn't to have wired you to come . . . just selfindulgence . . . gettin' lonely in my old age.” He grabbed her bag from the porter and went on talking as they walked out of the station. “Your mother's goin' along fine . . . I pulled her through. . . . Lucky I got wind that she was sick. That damn housephysician at the hotel would have killed her in another day. This Spanish influenza is tricky stuff.”

“Is it bad here, Daddy?”

“Very. . . . I want you to be very careful to avoid infection. . . . Hop in, I'll drive you out there.” He cranked the rusty touringcar and motioned her into the front seat. “You know how your poor mother feels about liquor? . . . Well, I kept her drunk for four days.”

He got in beside her and started, talking as he drove. The iron cold made her feel better after the dusty choking plush-smell of the sleeper. “She was nicer than I've ever known her. By God, I almost fell in love with her all over again. . . . You must be very careful not to let her do too much when she gets up . . . you know how she is. . . . It's the relapses that kill in this business.”

Mary felt suddenly happy. The bare twigs of the trees rosy and yellow and purple spread against the blue over the broad quiet streets.
There were patches of frozen snow on the lawns. The sky was tremendously tall and full of yellow sunlight. The cold made the little hairs in her nose crisp.

Out at the Broadmoor Mother was lying in her bed in her neat sunny room with a pink bedjacket on over her nightgown and a lace boudoircap on her neatlycombed black hair. She looked pale but so young and pretty and sort of foolish that for a second Mary felt that she and Daddy were the grownup people and Mother was their daughter. Right away Mother started talking happily about the war and the Huns and the submarine campaign and what could Mr. Wilson be thinking of not teaching those Mexicans a lesson. She was sure it wouldn't have been like that if Mr. Hughes had been elected; in fact she was sure that he had been elected legally and that the Democrats had stolen the election by some skulduggery or other. And that dreadful Bryan was making the country a laughingstock. “My dear, Bryan is a traitor and ought to be shot.” Daddy grinned at Mary, shrugged his shoulders and went off saying, “Now, Hilda, just stay in bed, and please, no alcoholic excess.”

When Daddy had gone Mother suddenly started to cry. When Mary asked her what was the matter she wouldn't say. “I guess it's the influenza makes me weak in the head,” she said. “My dear, it's only by the mercy of God that I was spared.”

Mary couldn't sit all day listening to her mother go on about preparedness, it made her feel too miserable; so she went down to Daddy's office next morning to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. The waitingroom was crowded. When she peeped into his consultingroom she could see at a glance that he hadn't been to bed all night. It turned out that Miss Hylan had gone home sick the day before. Mary said she'd take her place but Daddy didn't want to let her. “Nonsense,” said Mary, “I can say doctor's office over the phone as well as that awful Miss Hylan can.” He finally gave her a gauze mask and let her stay.

When they'd finished up the last patient they went over to the lunchroom for something to eat. It was three o'clock. “You'd better go out and see your mother,” he said. “I've got to start on my rounds. They die awful easy from this thing. I've never seen anything like it.”

“I'll go back and tidy up the desk first,” said Mary firmly.

“If anybody calls up tell them that if they think it's the flu, the patient must be put right to bed, keep their feet warm with a hotwater
bottle and plenty of stimulants. No use trying to go to the hospital because there's not a bed in a radius of a hundred miles.”

Mary went back to the office and sat down at the desk. There seemed to be an awful lot of new patients; on the last day Miss Hylan had run out of indexcards and had written their names on a scratchpad. They were all flu cases. While she sat there the phone rang constantly. Mary's fingers were cold and she felt trembly all over when she heard the anxious voices, men's, women's, asking for Doc French. It was five before she got away from the office. She took the streetcar out to the Broadmoor.

It gave her quite a turn to hear the band playing in the casino for the teadance and to see the colored lights and feel the quiet warmth of the hotel halls and the air of neat luxury in her mother's room. Mother was pretty peevish and said what was the use of her daughter's coming home if she neglected her like this. “I had to do some things for Daddy,” was all Mary said. Mother started talking a blue streak about her campaign to put German women out of the Woman's Tuesday Lunch Club. It went on all through supper. After supper they played cribbage until Mother began to feel sleepy.

The next day Mother said she felt fine and would sit up in a chair. Mary tried to get Daddy on the phone to see if she ought to but there was no answer from the office. Then she remembered that she'd said she'd be there at nine and rushed downtown. It was eleven o'clock and the waitingroom was full before Daddy came in. He'd evidently just been to a barbershop to get shaved but he looked deadtired. “Oh, Daddy, I bet you haven't been to bed.” “Sure, I got a couple of hours in one of the interne's rooms at the hospital. We lost a couple of cases last night.”

All that week Mary sat at the desk in the waitingroom of Daddy's office, answering the phone through the gauze mask, telling frightened flushed men and women who sat there feeling the aches beginning in their backs, feeling the rising fever flush their cheeks, not to worry, that Doc French would be right back. At five she'd knock off and go to the hotel to eat supper and listen to her mother talk, but Daddy's work would be just beginning. She tried hard to get him to take a night off for sleep every other night. “But how can I? McGuthrie's laid up and I've got all his practice to handle as well as my own. . . . This damn epidemic can't last indefinitely. . . . When it lets up a little we'll go out to the Coast for a couple of weeks. How about it?” He had a hacking cough and looked grey under the eyes but he insisted he was tough and felt fine.

Sunday morning she got downtown late because she'd had to go to church with Mother and found Daddy dozing hunched up in a chair. When she came into the office he jumped up with a guilty look and she noticed that his face was very flushed. “Been to church, eh, you and your mother?” he said in a curious rasping voice. “Well, I've got to be gettin' about my business.” As he went out the door with his soft felt hat pushed far down over his eyes it crossed Mary's mind that perhaps he'd been drinking.

There didn't seem to be many calls that Sunday so she went back home in time to take a drive with her mother in the afternoon. Mrs. French was feeling fine and talking about how Mary ought to make her debut next fall. “After all, you owe it to your parents to keep up their position, dear.” Talk like that made Mary feel sick in the pit of her stomach. When they got back to the hotel she said she felt tired and went to her room and lay on the bed and read
The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Before she went out next morning she wrote a letter to Miss Addams telling her about the flu epidemic and saying that she just couldn't go back to college, with so much misery going on in the world, and couldn't they get her something to do at Hull House? She had to feel she was doing something real. Going downtown in the streetcar she felt rested and happy at having made up her mind; at the ends of streets she could see the range of mountains white as lumps of sugar in the brilliant winter sunshine. She wished she was going out for a hike with Joe Denny. When she put her key in the office door the carbolic iodiform alcohol reek of the doctor's office caught her throat. Daddy's hat and coat were hanging on the rack. Funny, she hadn't noticed his car at the curb. The groundglass door to the consultingroom was closed. She tapped on it. “Daddy,” she called. There was no answer. She pushed the door open. Oh, he was asleep. He was lying on the couch with the laprobe from the car over his knees. The thought crossed her mind, how awful if he was dead-drunk. She tiptoed across the room. His head was jammed back between the pillow and the wall. His mouth had fallen open. His face, rough with the grey stubble, was twisted and strangled, eyes open. He was dead.