Conflict (Prouty)/Book 3/Chapter 1
Sheilah knelt down before the gas stove and opened the door. She drew the roasting-pan toward her a little way, and proceeded to baste the round mound of sizzling flesh, turning her face away as it spurted and fumed at her as if it protested. It was a terribly hot day. Already 92 by the thermometer on the shaded back porch, and it wasn't twelve o'clock yet. Why had she attempted to roast a beef to-day? And why did she care how it was roasted? Just so it wasn't raw? Just so it was material to keep the children alive and the doctor's bills low? She shoved the beef back into place and closed the oven door.
When she stood up she leaned a moment against the kitchen table and closed her eyes. Lately, when she stood up, things swam and looked dark for a moment afterward. And it was necessary to lean down so often! There were so many things to pick up in a small apartment, with three children and no one but a seventeen-year-old negro girl, who came Monday mornings and two afternoons a week, to help. She opened her eyes and gazed through the liquid air in which she found she was still immersed, at the alarm-clock on the kitchen mantel. Eleven-thirty, and she hadn't as much as glanced into the boys' room yet. She knew how it would look.
She wasn't disappointed. Standing in the doorway, leaning against the casing, she sighed. Not so much at the confusion that met her eyes—untidy beds, open bureau drawers, books, toys, children's clothes of all descriptions, scattered everywhere in dreadful disarray, as at the proof it was to her of her failure as a mother. Children shouldn't be allowed to leave a room in such a condition. But lately it was so much easier not to discipline—pick up the toys, close the drawers, hang up the clothes herself. Quietly. Without controversy. It occurred to her that it would be easier still to leave the room as it was. After all, making a bed was but a convention. Why bother so? But even while she contemplated this new avenue of escape she was putting the beds into some sort of order, pulling up the blankets, tucking them in. She ought to change the sheets, she supposed, and she hadn't turned the matresses for weeks! But she was so tired, and no one would know or care.
That was one advantage in having moved away from Wallbridge. Keeping up appearances even to the extent of clean sheets had been such a burden in Wallbridge. She had been proud then. She hadn't wanted pity from her friends. She and Felix had been living for nearly ten years now, in the crowded, wooden-apartment district on the edge of Boston, as far removed as possible from the desirable suburbs; and ideally inconveniently located in relation to the automobile road to Wallbridge. Her old friends had not attempted to look her up. She had practically no callers. Even her own mother, before she had died, had come very seldom. There was no necessity for making the beds at all. Why did she keep on doing it morning after morning? The woman downstairs didn't.
She was again leaning against a table, waiting to rise to the surface of the dizziness into which again she had plunged (after having captured an elusive shoe from under the far corner of one of the beds), when she heard the screen door to the back porch slam. And steps. A child's steps. Roddie's she thought. Why was he home from school so early? She went to the kitchen door. Yes, Roddie crying. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, his face all red and distorted, like one of those toy faces made of pliable red rubber that can be squeezed into unpleasant expressions, both his hands shoved into his trousers pockets. Baggy trousers. Too big for him. So was the coat.
Most of Roddie's clothes were too big. Felix's sister Gretchen had a boy a few years older than Roddie. It was very kind of Gretchen to send Sam's outgrown things to Roddie. They were not usually badly worn. The sexton's son, whom Gretchen had married, had done well. He had become a successful automobile agent. He lived in Detroit, Michigan, owned two cars, and Gretchen kept two maids.
'What's the matter?' said Sheilah to Roddie, not approaching. He didn't act like a child in pain.
He glanced up at her out of his little bright, slanting eyes, and then down again quickly. He never carried his head high, but now he would have hidden it completely under a wing if he had had one.
'What have you done?' asked Sheilah, her voice more weary than severe in spite of her efforts.
For answer he drew his hands from his trousers pocket and offered her a crumpled note, then pushed by her, and sobbing out loud went into the bedroom Sheilah had just left.
Sheilah opened the note. It was signed by Roddie's teacher. She read it hastily—only the important words registering. 'Not his first offense. Going on all winter more or less. Have talked to him repeatedly. Useless. Thought best to send him home to you—we consider cheating—' She got no further.
Roddie! Cheating!
She closed her eyes a moment and leaned her forehead against the back of her hand that held the crumpled note. Then groped her way to Roddie who was lying on the bed, which she had just made. She sat down beside him and put her hand upon him.
'Is this true, Roddie?'
A big sob jerked his hunched shoulders and he tried to burrow his head further out of sight. It was sufficient acknowledgment.
Silently Sheilah gazed upon him. He was curled up as tight as a fallen caterpillar—his knees drawn up to meet his chin, his hands tucked out of sight, his face completely hidden. Only the back of his head was visible—a bit of dark thick hair rumpled and clotted. Roddie's hair never lay straight because of the two cowlicks like Felix's. Sheilah sighed. Another Felix. Yes, another Felix. And inside as well as out!
Oh, how useless it had been all these years to combat a law so much stronger than herself. Well, she wouldn't combat it any longer. She would accept it. Perhaps she would be happier. An animal in captivity suffers less when it has at last learned the wisdom of not attempting to break bars.
'Get up and wash your face,' she said quietly to Roddie. 'I must get dinner.' And she went out into the kitchen, and knelt down before the gas stove, and mechanically set to basting the roast beef again.
Laetitia and Phillip would be home a few minutes after one. The public school they all attended was just around the corner. Laetitia was three years older than Roddie, and Phillip was three years younger, and Esther (Esther, whom she mustn't think about) was three years younger than Phillip. Or would have been three years younger if she had lived.
Sheilah had given them the nicest names she knew. Rodney had been her favorite boy's name ever since she was a little girl. It stood for courage and honesty, straight shoulders and a clear eye; Laetitia for the sort of charm and delicacy one finds in fragile, slender-stemmed flowers; Phillip was the name of a young prince to her; and Esther had always meant a beautiful, white, still star. But they weren't like their names, except Esther, and Esther hadn't lived.
Strange how the fact that Esther hadn't lived kept repeating itself to Sheilah whenever she was tired, or particularly discouraged, outweighing in its significance the immediate cause for her despair. Of them all Esther hadn't lived, and of them all, Esther had been the only one who hadn't looked like a little Chinese baby when she was born—dark, amber-colored almost, with a lot of black straight hair and little red puffs with slanting slits in them for eyes. Well, she was glad Esther hadn't lived now. Poor little alien here.
Sheilah managed with the help of a wet dish-cloth and a charred iron-holder to lift the beef onto the top of the stove. It was nearly enough done, she guessed. Then she sat down, and leaning her head on her hand, supported by her elbow resting on the kitchen table, she closed her eyes. She wished she could cry. Ever since Esther had died all her eyes ever did was just to smart. All her heart ever did, too! Esther had died nearly a year ago, now. She ought to be getting used to it by this time. But she wasn't getting used to it! There had been something so comforting—so completing about Esther, as if she had at last found a part of herself, for which she had been looking for a long while, and it made her whole.
Esther and Sheilah had been as alike as two flowers on the same stem. Esther had had corn-flower blue eyes and corn-silk gold hair. When she was two years old Sheilah had cut off one of the transparent curls of fragile gold, that drifted around her head as light as floating bubbles, and placed it in an envelope with a curl of her own, which her mother had cut at the same age. And now she couldn't tell the two pressed circles apart. They were as alike as two petals of the same flower.
Not only did the blue and gold match, but other things, such as smiles, pitch of voice, and set of head, and a certain poise and dignity that graced even a high-chair. And such daintiness! How Esther had loved things clean! There had always been clean sheets often enough on Esther's bed. Esther used to pat the fresh linen gratefully with her delicate finger-tips. And Sheilah would pat it, too, and their eyes would meet in mutual appreciation. Oh, if only Esther had lived, then it wouldn't matter so much if Laetitia was a second Gretchen. Roddie could cheat, and Phillip could stay on indefinitely in the first grade, and still there would be joy left in living—justification for effort, recompense for disappointment, reward for perseverance. Oh well, she mustn't think about Esther. It was better for Esther not to have lived. She rose. She must make the gravy.
'Gosh! But it's sizzling in here!' exclaimed Laetitia when she entered the kitchen five minutes later.
She was what would be called a big girl for her age—full-hipped, round-busted, and not used enough yet to her recently acquired woman's contour to know how to dress to become it.
Sheilah let the 'gosh' pass without comment to-day. Laetitia heard a great deal of slang at school. Sheilah had never been able to make it clear to Laetitia why slang, and now, of late, scented powder and rouge, were undesirable in so young a girl. All the other girls at school, Laetitia argued, used all three; and Aunt Gretchen, whom Laetitia visited last summer, hadn't minded a bit.
Roddie had appeared from the bedroom by this time. He had stopped crying, but his face was red and swollen.
'What sort of a scrape's he got into?' demanded Laetitia.
'Never mind,' said Sheilah briefly. Then, 'if you don't care, children,' she went on, 'I'll carve the meat out here to-day—and not bother to set the table, it's so hot. Go and wash your face and hands, Phillip.'
Phillip had arrived now. Phillip was as little and shrunken as Laetitia was big and overgrown. The doctor had had a hard time with Phillip when he was a baby, persuading him to grow, and now his teachers were having an equally hard time persuading him to read. But he had clever fingers. As a baby he had loved to sit beside Felix evenings at the work-bench in the dining-room, and hold the delicate parts of the miniature furniture his father made, while the glue dried. 'Steady as a vise,' Felix used to say. Now Phillip was old enough to work on the furniture himself. He did practically all the sandpapering. And the rungs of some of the chairs were as slender as jack-straws. There was a suggestion of Sheilah about Phillip. His eyes were corn-flower blue, but the rest of him was like his Grandfather Nawn, even to the crooked, undershot teeth. The teeth must be straightened sometime. It would take a great deal of money, and perhaps he wouldn't be any better off for it. Why fight nature so?
'What's the matter?' Laetitia asked her mother before she went back to school for the afternoon study-period; for Sheilah had gone to her bedroom and lain down, as soon as she had carved the meat.
'Just the heat, I think.'
'Can I do anything?'
Laetitia was the best-intentioned girl in the world. Often she wanted to help, but she did it so awkwardly! Sheilah would be ever so grateful now fora little cold water in the hot-water bag to put at the back of her neck. She often gave the children cold water like that on hot nights. But no, she'd get it herself later.
'No, dear, thank you,' she replied.
Laetitia crossed the room, picked up Sheilah's silver hand mirror from the bureau, carried it close to the window, and fell to inspecting a small red spot on her chin.
'Please put my mirror down,' said Sheilah.
'I'm not hurting it.'
'But I do so want to be quiet.'
'I wasn't making a noise.'
'And alone.'
'Oh, all right,' said Laetitia, and Sheilah, from behind her closed eyes, heard her cross the room, on her heels, heavily, as her own mother used to walk, and lay the mirror down. And as she had longed for a closed door between herself and her mother, now she longed for it between herself and her child. A punishment perhaps. No, she was too sensible to believe that! Simply Nature repeating itself according to its way.
On the threshold Laetitia turned and hesitated.
'I wanted to ask you something.'
'What is it?'
'After supper can I go to the Movies to-night? The gang's all going, but I told them there wasn't any use my even asking.' 'Why—yes—go if you want to.'
'What?'
'I said, go, go, dear, if you want to.'
'The name of the picture is "His Six Wives."' remarked Laetitia.
'Is it? Well, do as you want to. I don't care, Please close the door when you go out.'