The Man Who Loved Children (12 page)

“Whitey! Whitey! C’mon in. C’mon in and yuh kin use me truck.” Whitey giggled. “Hit’s my kyar,” wheedled Sam, “you got tuh aks me. Ain’t dat de troof, boys?”

The comedy went on, rather feebly supported by the Pollit children. The truck transaction was a serious one, involving the White goat which ate the mayflower when imported into Tohoga’s gardens, and their father was making a fool of himself; but they were high-minded about it, they let him amuse himself. Presently Whitey was induced to come up the steps to have some orange juice. They all sat on the homemade bench along the wall.

“Now I’ve got five sons,” said Sam; “all I reed is five more.” His sons grinned with embarrassment.

“Oo, Taddy,” murmured Evie, anxiously, “you’d have too many: there wouldn’t be enough to eat.”

“For ten sons, I’d make enough to eat. We’d grow it ourselves. We’d farm out all our land, one strip per lad, we’d grow all our own bread, veg, and everything. I’d get some more womenfolk and we’d make our own bread and everyfink. What do you fink, Whitey?”

“Sure, you could grow your own cows too and get milk too,” declared Whitey excitedly. Sam was flattered.

“I wish I had a hundred sons and daughters,” Sam rejoined with equal excitement, “then I wouldn’t have a stroke of work to do, see. All you kids could work for me. I’d have a CCC camp for the boys and an SSS, spick-and-span settlement for the girls. No work for Mother, Dad, or Bonnie. Yes, the Mormings [Mormons] had the right idea altogether: fifty women and their children and no work for the old man.” He grinned wickedly at Louisa who was staring out of the kitchen window.

“My father’s going to Manila and Malaya,” Little-Sam told the visitor.

Some discussion ensued as to whether he was going by bus, boat, or airplane. Sam let them spar for a while and then went into detail, dreamy-eyed, warmly describing the journey over land and sea, the peoples he would
come into contact with.
He carried them along with him, while they sat with dimmed glare of eyes and lips apart, telling that this—

“—came near to the heart of my dreams and will help me to fulfill one of my most ardent wishes—as Looloo knows and Ernie too—to know my fellow man to the utmost—as you will all, someday, and little Whitey here too, perhaps—to penetrate into the hearts of dark, yellow, red, tawny, and tattooed man. For I believe that they are all the same man at heart and that a good one; and they can be brought together sooner or later by their more advanced brothers into a world fellowship, in which all differences of nationality, creed, or education will be respected and gradually smoothed out, and eventually the religion of all men will be one and the same—world peace, world love, world understanding, based on science and the fit education of even the meanest, most wretched. Not the communism of today, which is a political doctrine—not of hate, I wouldn’t say that—but of war, class war, hated sound—the doctrine of misguided but certainly well-meaning men, for I have met some of them and there are fine fellows in it, though not fitted to be leaders, because not understanding human love—but a doctrine of confusion, let us say, and confusion is not based on science. We are all, so important to ourselves, only members of a species. The species must be our concern. But we are not animals: species must not fight species for mutual extermination. We are men; we must get together for the good of the genus, indeed of the natural order, so to speak.” He smiled a broad, public-meeting smile.

The children, after staring, as if at the movies, at his verbal pictures of all those colored men, had passed into a trance, but were now getting restless; and Sam stopped when he saw this.

Louisa was propping herself up against the railing. She was staring at her father absently. The morning was hot, and Sam had nothing on beneath his painting overalls. When he waved his golden-white muscular hairless arms, large damp tufts of yellow-red hair appeared. He kept on talking. The pores on his well-stretched skin were very large, his leathery skin was quite unlike the dull silk of the children’s cheeks. He was not ashamed of his effluvia, thought it a gift that he sweated so freely; it was “natural.” The scent that women used, he often remarked, was to cover lack of washing!

“My system,” Sam continued, “which I invented myself, might be called
Monoman
or
Manunity!
”

Evie laughed timidly, not knowing whether it was right or not. Louisa said, “You mean Monomania.”

Evie giggled and then lost all her color, became a stainless olive, appalled at her mistake.

Sam said coolly, “You look like a gutter rat, Looloo, with that expression. Monoman would only be the condition of the world after we had weeded out the misfits and degenerates.” There was a threat in the way he said it. “This would be done by means of the lethal chamber and people might even ask for the painless death, or
euthanasia,
of their own accord.”

Louisa couldn’t help laughing at the idea, and declared, “They wouldn’t.”

“People would be taught, and would be anxious to produce the new man and with him the new state of man’s social perfection.”

“Oh, murder me, please, I’m no good,” squeaked Ernie suddenly. Of course, he had instant success, and Sam chuckled. But nothing more happened nor was any more heard at the moment of Sam’s ideal state, Manunity, or Monoman.

They heard a weird, distorted wheezing, “Phoe-bee! Phoe-bee!” and looked round startled; for it was not the Phoebe, but rather like the clanking ghost of a Phoebe, or even a very old man of a Phoebe in his last sneeze at life. But then they saw their friend, the catbird, Mr. Dumetella, back on the little naked twig of elm, where he swung all the summer: he was merely practicing the flycatcher’s call for his own repertory. After a few such wheezes, the bird ceased mocking and began to trill.

“How he sings, how he loves to be heard!” cried Sam with rapture and began to whistle to the bird. It stopped and listened attentively. For months they had been teaching him songs to put into his medley. Sam and the boys were all excellent whistlers.

“And now,” called Sam, “jobs, boys, jobs. Whitey can work up the putty.” He lobbed off the veranda, leading them, and they all joined in his song, “I Know a Bank.”

The whole community worked. Louie was making the beds; Evie was doing the slops; Mother had decided to make some raspberry tarts, and Aunt Bonnie peeled the potatoes. It was a sizzling, pungent Sunday morning full of oven odors. Bonnie kept bursting into song, and upstairs Louie too could be heard crooning, “Bid me to live and I will live, thy protestant to be.” A great chorus came from the washhouse. Henny was absorbed in her own ideas and hardly heard the jubilaum; besides which, she was so used to what she called the “Pollit buzzing” that she could bear it when the day was fine. She only opened her ears when Louie’s song ceased. That usually meant that Louie was no longer working but was beginning to loiter or to read. In fact, Louie was staring out of the back attic window, southerly, where she could catch a glimpse of the stones of the capital widely tumbled through the river reek: and she was thinking—repeating rather, something from Thoreau, “Morning work! What should be man’s morning work?” But she was not thinking that. She was glowing with pleasure and imagining a harlequinade of scenes in which she, Louie, was acting, declaiming (but not, not like the Pollits, nor like comic-opera Auntie Bonnie), to a vast, shadowy audience stretching away into an opera house as large as the world, with tiers of boxes as high as the Cathedral at least. She had a leading man, a shade of giant proportions, something like Mephisto, but he did not count, she only counted: she projected the shadow of her soul over this dream population, who applauded from time to time with a noise like leaves bowling over the path—as they were doing at this moment in the cement paths of Tohoga House and on the asphalt pavements outside, which she could see at intervals, through the moving shawls of leaves.

Now, at the same time that her stepmother downstairs, conscious of the silence above, was thinking, “I must remember to write Samuel a note to speak to his daughter about her dirt and laziness (only she is so darned callous, she doesn’t listen even to him—),” Louie muttered aloud to herself over the window sill, “If I did not know I was a genius, I would die: why live?”

Evie appeared in the doorway of the boys’ attic. “What did you say, Louie?”

“Nothing; have you finished the slops?”

“Will you carry Auntie Bonnie’s pail down?”

“All right,” said Louie angrily.

Evie went back into the room, drooping, offended. “Mother said you were always to carry it.”

Louie turned on her and bellowed, “I know what Mother said.”

Evie shrank back, startled, her eyes wide open, the pupils enlarged with fear. She had seen an awful sight, Louie in one of her passions. In such a moment, nothing would hold her back, she knew nothing but herself, no one, and the worst thing, more terrifying, was the way she villainously held back the animal in her, while it waited to pounce. Once she had flown to Evie, started to drag her by the hair: once she had burst a boil on Ernie’s temple. She went pale, her rather pale eyes on the contrary becoming dark, and her hair seeming to stiffen.

Louie, for her part, felt her heart sink. She had never seen such a look of terror on her sister’s face: she felt she was a human beast of some sort. She resolved never to let Evie see her anger again. Evie might sink into a fit. One processional sunset, coming home from Baltimore, they had had to get out of the car, carrying Evie stiff and white, to a house on the roadside; and Louie might have made this happen again. She was incapable of caressing her sister, but she said gently,

“Never mind, never mind! I will.”

Of course, the morning, every morning, was full of such incidents. That was family life. They were all able to get through the day without receiving any particular wounds; every such thing left its tiny scar, but their infant skins healed with wonderful quickness.

A roaring broke out downstairs, the sound of the blowtorch with which their father was beginning on the porch handrail. The two girls hung out the window and observed a respectful group of little boys, the Pollit boys and Whitey, and Whitey’s brother, Borden (who had been sent to bring him home).

Saul looked up at an airplane, saw his sisters, and yelled, “Daddy’s using the blowtorch, come and see!”

Little-Sam yelled out above the blowing, “Is that Loolook? Soon time for alevena, Loolook!”
Alevena
was the eleven o’clock meal, with tea, sandwiches, and fruit, which all the children shared. They had either bananas cut up on bread or sirup-and-butter on bread. Louie hurried down to get it ready. Meantime a wonderful smell of roasting meat and cooking pastry streamed out of the kitchen, and there was in it the smell of slightly roasted linen. Bonnie was ironing blouses for her sister-in-law and herself for the afternoon. Just as Louie had got to the last three steps and had stopped to stare out at the wan, withered, and flourishing world, seen through the blue, yellow, and green panes of the pointed hall window, and at the fire-bellied newts in the aquarium, Henny’s raucous shout came from the kitchen,

“Bonnie, look at you’re doing!”

“Oh, heaven’s sake!”

There was a rush of feet. Louie moved along too. When she got to the door, her mother turned to her at once and said, with concentrated exasperation,

“Look at your darnfool aunt’s done! Look at it, my best blouse! I suppose I’m supposed to go out of this house naked; you’d think they’d put their heads together!” and she flung out of the kitchen into her bedroom. Sam was staring in the window, in consternation, his cheeks flecked with old paint, his mouth open. Bonnie, with her hair damp and tumbled, was holding helplessly in her hands, so that they could see, a blouse so badly burned that the burned piece flapped in and out like a shutter. It was a fine embroidered lawn blouse, which Henny had got from her cousin Laurie, the rich one in Roland Park.

“I just looked round for a second,” Bonnie explained, frightened, looking first at her brother, then at Louie. “I looked out of the window because Pet told me she couldn’t endure the smell of the blowtorch and I thought I’d say alevena—and then I seemed to smell something—I couldn’t tell what, it seemed familiar. You know when there’s a combination of smells, you find it hard to distinguish? When I looked back, there it was smoking up from the board. Such bad luck! I knew it. I knocked over that vase Mrs. Rowings gave me this morning. I’d better break a cup right away. And Pet’s best blouse! Oh, I could cry.” She was crying. “Poor Pet: you can’t blame her,” she pleaded with her brother. A row of little heads, like coconuts, was laid on the sill. Whitey’s brother, Borden, had even come into the kitchen to stare. She was the guilty one, the cynosure of all eyes. Henny was exclaiming in her bedroom,

“Oh, God! What a pack! I’ll shoot myself rather than live in the house with such fools! I must be mad!” Ernest, who had been staring solemnly, unexpectedly burst into a howl, a very comical howl, with his long black eyes shut and his mouth wide open and square: “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” he sobbed.

Sam muttered, “You women are always doing such darned-fool things!” He drew his gang away from the window.

“A kitchen is a laboratory: what would anybody think of a laboratory assistant that did things like that? Women need more scientific training!” He suddenly looked away, hearing something, and lunged forward, giving Little-Sam a clip on the ear. The boy had been circling round the blowtorch, fascinated, and had picked it up, merely out of curiosity about its weight. Sam caught the torch out of his son’s hands,

“You disobedient lout!” he shouted, in fear and distress. Little-Sam burst out into a faint yelping. The White boys ranged themselves side by side, entranced by the strange spectacle. Henny had not done exclaiming and now sallied into the kitchen where Bonnie was still fumbling and trying to explain everything,

“It was only a second—I don’t understand myself!” Bonnie only received five dollars a month pocket money from her brother who was always in straits and she didn’t see how she could get Henny such another blouse. Henny looked tragic in her long smudged dressing gown, with her hair hanging thin out of untidy braids, and she cried,