Ex-wifePart 17
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Part 17
And I was carried back to years in my ’teens when she had probed to find the facts behind any of my misdemeanours at school, that she might stand staunchly between me and the anger of a maiden aunt who was determined I should not be “spoilt.”
She thought she might have distressed me about Peter; so she changed the subject. “You can have a cigarette in here, if you want to,” she said. “I know smoking doesn’t mean you’re bad, it’s just foolishness you picked up from that husband of yours.” She put her empty supper tray aside.
I lighted a cigarette, and walked about and examined the photographs that were the only decorations on her walls. Photographs and daguerreotypes. One was her brother and her lover, who “took the shilling” together some fifty years ago when times were hard in Canada. They died in some forgotten British border war, in Her Majesty’s colonies. The daguerreotype was a faded picture of two young men looking solemn and uncomfortable in old-fashioned regimentals.
Nellie stayed “faithful to a memory” apparently. Father used to tell me that, when she was young, he hoped she would marry because she was so mad about children. But, every “First Friday,” through forty years she had gone to communion for the repose of her brother’s and her “young man’s” soul. She often told me when I was a child, that she was happy looking forward to seeing them again in Heaven.
She had, besides their picture, photographs of mother, and of the babies who died, and at least eight of me because I was the last child and was “her” baby.
I walked about the room, regarding the photographs; and stopped, suddenly, before one I had not seen.
It was a mother-and-child picture, of me, looking very overwhelmed, and of that baby Patrick. I had forgotten about that.
When he was two months old, Nellie persuaded me to have his picture taken. The proofs of those photographs came after he was dead. I had never looked at them. I did not want to.
Her old voice was gentle. “You don’t mind my having that, do you, lamb? I found the proofs, and had them finished up; he was such a beautiful little boy.”
I threw my cigarette away, and hunted for my voice. “It’s all right,” I said. “That was a pretty dress he had on.”
“He’d be two years and two months old,” she said.
He was a picture of a baby with fuzz on his head, and a smiling toothless mouth, and unbelievably little square hands. His enormous eyes, and the length of his lashes, showed in the photograph.
I looked at it. There had been a year when I looked at babies in carriages in the street—most of them were fat and healthy but none of them had eyelashes that really curled like his. I had stopped looking at them, long ago.
“Nellie,” I said, “babies two years old can talk and walk, can’t they. What do they talk about?”
“Indeed they can talk,” she said. “I remember I taught you a poem out of a book, to tell your mother when she came back from a trip. You weren’t much more than two. It was part of ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ and you didn’t know what any of the words meant, but you said them off as nice—”
I stared at the photograph. Young woman who had been me—need not have been so bewildered, the baby was not a problem long. Baby in an absurd full frock—with his toes showing under it, if one looked for them carefully. His name had been Patrick. He used to feel warm to hold.
I had got over any grief for him.
And then, because I had got over losing him, and could not remember very well what he had been like, I went and sat on the edge of Nellie’s wide bed, and I cried against the cleanness of her cotton nightgown.
She patted my head, with rough old hands. “There, child,” she said. “You mustn’t sorrow over him. He’s a little angel in Heaven and I often think your mother must be glad to have him to keep her company. He might have grown to be a disappointment to you—and now he’s safe with God. In His own time you’ll see him again in Heaven. . . .”
The gentle voice was altogether cheerful. Heaven was to her as real a place as was to me the advertising department where I spent my days.
I grew calm, under the ineffably kind touch of her hands.
I wished that Heaven were real to me, and wondered why it was not, to me or any contemporaries I knew. The Victorians had been able to leave things to God—or the next generation. But the sound of guns and the knowledge of the immediacy of death and the desire to live as swiftly as possible, in the little time that youth and capacity to live swiftly, lasted—had got between that next generation and any whispering of angels. Perhaps that was it—it did not matter why, really—we had to get on without Heaven as best we could.
Nellie had found a way of changing the subject again.
“Patricia, I wish you could advise me. I’ve done something I think is very wicked.”
She had never done anything more wicked in her life than beg a prescription from father, for wine to use in making sauce madère.
“What is it, Nellie?”
“I’ve taken out naturalization papers.”
I did not see why that was wicked, but I thought it surprising; because father had tried for years to get her to become an American citizen, since she had lived in the United States most of her life, and had bought property here with her savings. She had always refused. “Forswear my allegiance to the crown my brother died for?” (that was just about her phrase,) “never!”
“How did you happen to do that, Nellie?”
She reached for a box, that held money, a rosary, a prayer book, and snapshots of her nieces in Canada. She extracted after some search, a newspaper picture of Al Smith, coming out of a Cathedral after his daughter’s wedding. She showed it to me.
“There,” she said, “doesn’t he look like a good pious father and husband? The doctor says he’ll be running for President next year, and I got naturalized so I can vote for him! He looks like an honest Christian, and I thought I should.”
She sighed a little. “I do feel dreadful though, because it’s as if I were throwing my allegiance in the face of my brother and that friend of his, in the picture over there. It makes them seem away off somewhere. That I should live long enough to give up my allegiance to the crown— Do you know, Patricia, if it had been in the Old Queen’s lifetime I could never have done it.”
“Nellie, Nellie,” I said, “the story should be captioned ‘Queen Victoria’s Death Gains Al Smith One Vote.’”
She did not understand me, but she smiled. “Now don’t you be making fun of me, child; it was a great difficulty I had, deciding. You go to bed, and rest, and I’ll send that Little Nellie up with your breakfast in the morning.”
I had a week-end of conversation with father about Massachusetts politics, and about his difficulties with the real-estate on which he depended for a competence, now that he was old, and retired from active practice; a week-end of too many and too elaborate meals thrust at me by Nellie, who produced in swift succession every dish I had been eager for when I was young.
Sunday afternoon (it was Nellie’s “day out” and Father was resting), I sat by a window of the long livingroom, and read “Vanity Fair” (Thackeray’s not Condé Nast’s), and had tea; and watched the dark grow. From that window I could look down the slope of Milton Hill, and see the reflection of the sunset dim on the icy river.
Roger had taught me to skate on that river, a lifetime ago, or the day before yesterday; some indeterminate time past. I thought about the Heaven that Nellie was so sure about; and tried to imagine Roger going on to be a statesman of some other country beyond that winter sky outside. It seemed conceivable. Perhaps it would seem realler some day, if I grew to be very old.
Meanwhile there was New York and the advertising business.
While a cab waited at the door, and I said “good-bye” to father, who was not well enough to go to the station, and to a wet-eyed Nellie, who urged me to write him more often, I wished I did not have to leave him.
Families—strangers who knew one well when one was a child.
In the cab, I lighted a cigarette, and wondered if Lucia’s train from Portland would connect with the five o’clock to New York.
XI
I was assistant advertising manager, within one step of having a secretary of my own. I had, already, a private office with a desk and a rug and a typewriter and a window and a telephone that rang twenty times an hour.
It was the fifth anniversary of my marriage. I was sad about that for ten minutes, in a cab on my way to work; and I might be sad about it again on my way home from work. In the interval I was very busy answering the telephone, and hoping I would be an advertising manager and have a secretary to answer it, soon.
It rang. The millinery buyer wanted extra space on the Friday page. I said I would let her know definitely later.
It rang. The typographer wanted to know where the cuts for the rotogravure page were, because the “Times” had called him to find out when it would be ready. I told him to telephone the engraver. I told someone in the department to telephone the engraver and rush him.
I began an ad on “We are seventy-four years young.” It was a “prestige” ad. A “prestige” ad is a thing on which store owners spend money, sorrowfully, because other store owners spend money on “prestige” ads, sorrowfully.
The telephone rang. The lingerie buyer wanted extra space on the Friday page. I was inconclusive about whether or not she would get it. The telephone rang. A printer wanted to tell me that he could not match paper on the folder of which we needed five hundred extra copies for mailing by noon. I encouraged a young copy-writer who was ambitious to be an assistant advertising manager, to run around in a few circles over that.
The telephone rang. The shoe buyer wanted larger space on the Friday page.
I wrote a little more copy on “We expect to be young for seventy-four years more.” (We were going to have an anniversary sale soon.)
The telephone rang. The “Times” announced irritably that our rotogravure copy was already three hours late, and they could not hold the space much longer. I was wistful with them. I sent someone to quarrel with the engraver about the missing cuts on that page. The engraver telephoned me, that there was so much etching on those cuts he could not deliver them to the typographer to “prove up” and send to the “Times,” for three hours more. I was wistful-with-an-undertone-of-rage, with him.
I wrote a little more copy. The ambitious young copy-writer came in to demand praise for having solved the printer’s difficulty. I praised her. The telephone rang. The glove buyer wanted more space on the Friday page. I was pessimistic with him. The telephone rang. The advertising manager (in conference with the FIRM) told me to cut the Friday page to six columns, and cut every department’s space proportionately. The telephone rang. Lucia wanted to know “how about lunch?” I said I was having a sandwich sent in.
The telephone rang. The jewelry buyer wanted more space on the Friday page. I sympathized with him. I told the layout man to cut everyone’s space on the Friday page. I wrote a little more copy. The “Times” telephoned. I said, “Just this once . . . give us a little more time . . . it will never happen again.” (I said that every other week.) The beauty shop telephoned to say I was ten minutes late for my shampoo appointment. I told them to cancel it.
The advertising manager telephoned to say they wanted the copy on “We have been young seventy-four years,” upstairs in an hour. I turned it over to the ambitious young copy-writer who was thrilled. I knew I should have to rewrite her version, but that would be faster than doing it myself.
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