His Family (6 page)

"I don't like what I see ahead of her. Nor do you," he said. "Be honest." She looked at him perplexedly.

"We can't stop it, can we? And even if we could," she said, "I'm not quite sure I'd want to. It's her love affair, not yours or mine--grown out of a life she made for herself--curious, eager, thrilled by it all--and in the center of her soul the deep glad growing certainty, 'I'm going to be a beautiful woman--I myself, I, Laura Gale!' Oh, you don't know--nor do I. And so she felt her way along--eagerly, hungrily, making mistakes--and you and I left her to do it alone. I'm afraid we both rather neglected her, dad," Deborah ended sadly. "And all we can do now, I think, is to give her the kind of wedding she wants."

Roger started to speak but hesitated.

"What is it?" she inquired.

"Queer," he answered gruffly, "how a man can neglect his children--as I have done, as I do still--when the one thing he wants most in life is to see each one of 'em happy."

CHAPTER VI

Roger soon grew accustomed to seeing young Sloane about the house. They could talk together more easily, and he began to call him Harold. Harold asked him with Laura to lunch at the Ritz to meet the aunt from Bridgeport, a lady excessively stout and profound. But that ended the formalities. It had all been so much easier than Roger had expected. So, in its calm sober fashion, the old house took into its life this new member, these new plans, and the old seemed stronger for the new--for Laura and Edith and Deborah drew together closer than they had been in many years. But only because they felt themselves on the eve of a still deeper and more lasting separation, as the family of Roger Gale divided and went different ways. At times he noticed it sadly. Laura, who had scarcely ever been home for dinner, now spent many evenings here. She needed her home for her wedding, he thought. Each daughter needed it now and then. But as the years wore slowly on, the seasons when they needed it grew steadily wider and wider apart....

Early in May, when Roger came home from his office one night he found Edith's children in the house. From the hallway he could hear their gay excited voices, and going into the dining room he found them at their supper. Deborah was with them, and at once her father noticed how much younger she appeared--as she always did with these children who all idolized her so. She rose and followed him into the hall, and her quiet voice had a note of compassion.

"Edith's baby is coming," she said.

"Good Lord. Is anything wrong?" he asked.

"No, no, it's all right--"

"But I thought the child wasn't due for three weeks."

"I know, and poor Edith is fearfully worried. It has upset all her plans. I'd go up and see her if I were you. Your supper is ready; and if you like you can have it with the children."

There followed a happy boisterous meal, with much expectant chatter about the long summer so soon to begin at the farm up in the mountains. George, whose hair was down over his eyes, rumpled it back absorbedly as he told of a letter he had received from his friend Dave Royce, Roger's farmer, with whom George corresponded. One of the cows was to have a calf, and George was anxious to get there in time.

"I've never seen a real new calf, new absolutely," he explained. "And I want a look at this one the very minute that he's born. Gee, I hope we can get there in time--"

"Gee! So do I!" cried Bobby aged nine. And then Tad, the chubby three-year-old who had been intently watching his brothers, slowly took the spoon from his mouth and in his grave sweet baby voice said very softly, "Gee." At her end of the table, Elizabeth, blonde and short and rather plump, frowned and colored slightly. For she was eleven and she knew there was something dark and shameful about the way calves appear in barns. And so, with a quick conscious cough, she sweetly interrupted:

"Oh, Aunt Deborah! Won't you please tell us about--about--"

"About--about," jeered the ironical George. "About what, you little ninny?" Poor Elizabeth blushed desperately. She was neither quick nor resourceful.

"Now, George," said his aunt warningly.

"Wasn't I talking?" the boy rejoined. "And didn't Betsy butt right in--without even a thing to butt in about? About--about," he jeered again.

"About Paris!" cried his sister, successful at last in her frantic search for a proper topic of conversation. "Aunt Deborah's trip to Paris!"

"How many times has she told it already?" her brother replied with withering scorn. "And anyhow, I was talking of cows!"

"Very well," said his aunt, "we'll talk about cows, some cows I saw on a lovely old farm in a little village over in France."

"There!" cried his young sister. "Did she ever tell of
that
part of her trip?" And she made a little face at her brother.

"I don't care," he answered doggedly. "She has told about Paris lots of times--and that was what
you
wanted. Yes, you did. You said, 'About Paris.' Didn't she, Bob?"

"You bet she did," young Bob agreed.

"Now, children, children, what does it matter?"

"All right, go ahead with your barn in France," said George with patient tolerance. "Did they have any Holsteins?"

Soon the questions were popping from every side, while little Tad beamed from one to the other. To Tad it was all so wonderful, to be having supper away from home, to be here, to go to bed upstairs, to take part perhaps in a pillow fight.... And glancing at the glowing face and the parted lips of his small grandson Roger felt a current of warm new life pour into his soul.

Early in the evening he went up to Edith's apartment. He found his daughter in her room, looking flushed and very tense. He took her arm and they walked for a time. A trained nurse was soaping the windows. Roger asked the reason for this and was told that in case the baby did not come till morning the doctor wanted to pull up the shades in order to work by daylight. "And neighbors in New York are such cats! You've no idea!" said Edith. She looked out at the numberless windows crowding close about her home, and she fairly bristled with scorn. "Oh, how I loathe apartments!"

"They seem to have come to stay, my dear. In a few years more New York will be a city without a house," he said. "Only a palace here and there." The thought flashed in his mind, "But I shall be gone."

"Then we'll move out to the country!" she cried. Still walking the floor with her father, she talked of the perplexities which in her feverish state of mind had loomed suddenly enormous. She had planned everything so nicely for the baby to come the first of June, but now her plans were all upset. She did not want the children here, it would make too much confusion. They had much better go up to the mountains, even though George and Elizabeth lost their last few weeks at school. But who could she find to take them? Bruce was simply rushed to death with his new receivership. Laura was getting her trousseau. Deborah, said Edith, had time for nothing on earth but school.

"Suppose I take them," Roger ventured. But she only smiled at this. "My dear," he urged, "your nurse will be with me, and when we arrive there's the farmer's wife." But Edith impatiently shook her head. Her warm bright eyes seemed to picture it all, hour by hour, day and night, her children there without her.

"You poor dear," she told him, "you haven't the slightest idea what it means. The summer train is not on yet, and you have to change three times on the way--with all the children--luggage, too. And there are their naps, and all their meals. You don't arrive till late at night. No," she decided firmly, "Bruce will simply have to go." She drew a breath of discomfort. "You go and talk to him," she said.

"I will, my dear." Roger looked at his daughter in deep concern. Awkwardly his heavy hand touched her small plump shoulder, and he felt the constant quivering there. "Now, now," he muttered, uneasily, "it's going to be all right, you know--" And at that she gave him a rapid glance out of those warm hunted eyes, as though to ask, "What do you know of this?" And Roger flinched and turned to the door.

Bruce was working at his desk, with an old briar pipe in his teeth. He looked up with a quick nervous smile which showed his dread of the coming ordeal, but his voice had a carefully casual tone.

"Does she want me now?" he asked.

"No," said Roger. And he told of her plan for the children. "I volunteered myself," he added, "but she wouldn't hear to it."

"Oh, my God, man, you wouldn't do," said Bruce, in droll disparagement. "You with forty-nine bottles of pasteurized milk? Suppose you smashed one? Where'd you be? Moving our family isn't a job; it's a science, and I've got my degree." He rose and his face softened. "Poor girl, she mustn't worry like that. I'll run in and tell her I'll do it myself--just to get it off her mind."

He went to his wife. And when he came back his dark features appeared a little more drawn.

"Poor devil," thought Roger, "he's scared to death--just as I used to be myself."

"Pretty tough on a woman, isn't it?" Bruce muttered, smiling constrainedly.

"Did Baird say everything's going well?" Baird was Edith's physician.

"Yes. He was here this afternoon, and he said he'd be back this evening." Bruce stopped with a queer little scowl of suspense. "I told her I'd see to the trip with the kiddies, and it seemed to relieve her a lot." His eye went to a pile of documents that lay on the desk before him. "It'll play the very devil with business, taking three days off just now. But I guess I can manage it somehow--"

A muscle began to twitch on his face. He re-lit his pipe with elaborate care and looked over at Roger confidingly:

"Do you know what's the matter with kids these days? It's the twentieth century," he said. "It's a disease. It starts in their teeth. No modern girl can get married unless she has had her teeth straightened for years. Our dentist's bill, this year alone, was over eight hundred dollars. But that isn't all. It gets into their young intestines, God bless 'em, and makes you pasteurize all they eat. It gets into their nerves and tears 'em up, and your only chance to save 'em is school--not a common school but a 'simple' school, tuition four hundred dollars a year. And you hire a dancing teacher besides--I mean a rhythm teacher--and let 'em shake it out of their feet. And after that you buy 'em clothes--not fluffy clothes, but 'simple' clothes, the kind which always cost the most. And then you build a simple home, in a simple place like Morristown. The whole idea is simplicity. If you can't make enough to buy it, you're lost. If you can make enough, just barely enough, you get so excited you lose your head--and do what I did Monday."

The two men smiled at each other. Roger was very fond of Bruce.

"What did you do Monday?" he asked.

"I bought that car I told you about."

"Splendid! Best thing in the world for you! Tell me all about it!"

And while Bruce rapidly grew engrossed in telling of the car's fine points, Roger pictured his son-in-law upon hot summer evenings (for Bruce spent his summers in town) forgetting his business for a time and speeding out into the country. Then he thought of Edith and the tyranny of her motherhood, always draining her husband's purse and keeping Edith so wrapt up in her children and their daily needs that she had lost all interest in anything outside her home. What was there wrong about it? He knew that Edith prided herself on being like her mother. But Judith had always found time for her friends. He himself had been more as Edith was now. How quickly after Judith died he had dropped all friends, all interests. "That's it," he ruefully told himself, "Edith takes after her father." And the same curious feeling which he had had with Laura, came back to him with her sister. This daughter, too, was a part of himself. His deep instinctive craving to keep to himself and his family was living on in Edith, was already dominating her home. What a queer mysterious business it was, this tie between a man and his child.

He was thinking of this when Baird arrived. Allan Baird was not only the doctor who had brought Edith's children into the world, he was besides an intimate friend, he had been Bruce's room-mate at college. As he came strolling into the room with his easy greeting of "Well, folks--" his low gruff voice, his muscular frame, over six feet two, and the kindly calm assurance in his lean strong visage, gave to Bruce and Roger the feeling of safety they needed. For this kind of work was his life. He had specialized on women, and after over fifteen years of toilsome uphill labor he had become at thirty-seven one of the big gynecologists. He was taking his success with the quiet relish of a man who had had to work for it hard. And yet he had not been spoiled by success. He worked even harder than before--so hard, in fact, that Deborah, with whom through Bruce and Edith he had long ago struck up an easy bantering friendship, had sturdily set herself the task of prying open his eyes a bit. She had taken him to her school at night and to queer little foreign cafés. And Baird, with a humor of his own, had retaliated by dragging her to the Astor Roof and to musical plays.

"If my eyes are to be opened," he had doggedly declared, "I propose to have some diamonds in the scenery, and a little cheery ragtime, too. You've got a good heart, Deborah Gale, but your head is full of tenements."

To-night to divert Bruce's thoughts from his wife, Baird started him talking of his work. In six weeks Bruce had crammed his mind with the details of skyscraper building, and his talk was bewildering now, bristling with technical terms, permeated through and through with the feeling of strain and fierce competition. As Roger listened he had again that sharp and oppressive sensation of a savage modern town unrelentingly pressing, pressing in. Restlessly he glanced at Baird who sat listening quietly. And Roger thought of the likeness between their two professions. For Bruce, too, was a surgeon. His patients were the husbands in their distracting offices. Baird's were the wives and mothers in their equally distracting homes. Which were more tense, the husbands or wives? And, good Lord, what was it all about, this feverish strain of getting and spending? What were they spending? Their very life's blood. And what were they getting? Happiness? What did most of them know of real happiness? How little they knew, how blind they were, and yet how they laughed and chattered along, how engrossed in their little games. What children, oh, what children!