You have felt this before, less acutely, that day for instance you ate dinner at the club with your son. What if he had known, what difference would it have made? What if the men around you, friends and acquaintances some of them, had known? They would not have been more than mildly interested; possibly some of them had done precisely the same thing at that same table.
Paul, his name is. You called him Paul. That didn’t seem real either. More than two years ago.
No surroundings anywhere were more familiar to you, since for a long time you had dined and spent many of your evenings at the club, but his presence made everything grotesque and strange. Not that you were affected in any way that mattered; it was as if he were a character in a play, and you had been unexpectedly called from the audience to go on the stage and sit down and talk with him, without knowing any of the lines.
You can still see that note, on a square piece of blue paper, which you found on your office desk one morning in the pile of personal mail.
“Dear Mr. Sidney,” it said, “if you can spare me an hour, some day this week, I would like very much to ask you about something. It was a long time ago, but I believe you will remember my name. Sincerely, Emily Davis.”
At the top was an address and telephone number.
You speculated about it idly, with little real curiosity. It was too far away, too dead, and it was even a little unpleasant with its reminder of old fires and hopes now extinguished, unrealized, and in retrospect ridiculous. You did not telephone, you had your secretary do it, and an appointment was made for the following afternoon.
Something unexpected came up at the office the next day, and you had to keep her waiting. When she was finally shown in and stood there uncertainly, just inside the door, you were genuinely shocked. She was an old woman. Everything about her admitted it; the plain unobtrusive dark brown dress, the formless little hat, the way she stood blinking in the bright light, her faintly dragging step as she came forward to meet you. But there was a firm strength in the shake of her hand. As she looked at you frankly and pleasantly, you could see anxious years in her eyes, and a present anxiety, too.
“Little Will Sidney,” she smiled. “Now that I see you, I know I was foolish to take so long to make up my mind.” She looked at you and around you. “What a fine office, and how fine you look!”
You tried to say that she too looked fine.
“Oh, I’m done for,” she replied, not sadly. “It’s like you to want to say it, you were a nice boy. I’m nearly sixty years old. That may be pretty hard for you to believe, but it’s not hard for me.”
You escorted her to the big leather seat in the corner, and took a chair in front of her. Only vaguely, and by an effort of the imagination, could you make the pretty, soft Mrs. Davis of those far-off juicy days out of this little dried-up woman. The eyes, perhaps; the rest was impossible.
She seemed to know a good deal about you, the year you had come to New York, the date of your marriage with Erma, the fact of your having no children. She told you, briefly but completely, of her own journey through the many days. Mr. Davis had practiced law in Cleveland, never very successfully, for seven years, then they had moved to Chicago. There it was even worse, he never squeezed more than a scanty living out of it; and there was nothing but a modest insurance payment left for his wife and little son when one winter he took pneumonia and died. Mrs. Davis managed to get a position as a teacher in the Chicago public schools, which she still held; she was in New York only for a visit, having come, it appeared, expressly to see you. She had somehow kept her son Paul fed and clothed to the end of High School, and he had worked his way through the University of Chicago.
“Anyway, I didn’t treat you the way you treated me in Cleveland,” you said with a smile. “Remember when I telephoned you, and you wouldn’t see me?”
She looked a little embarrassed. “I didn’t answer your note either. I wanted to. I cried that night for the first time in years. But it was as plain as the nose on your face. You were twenty-four and I was over forty, and Paul had come and I was no longer—well, I was pretty once. I was so glad, you have no idea, awfully glad you thought of me.”
She glanced at you, and then away.
“It’s Paul really I came to see you about. He graduated from the university two years ago; he’s twenty-four now. He’s a good boy and he’s not lazy, but I’m afraid for him. I thought you might help.”
“Where is he?”
“In New York, he’s been here over a year. He has a job now and then, but he thinks he wants to be a sculptor. He studied in Chicago a while, and now he works at it so hard, he can’t keep a job very long.”
This began to sound ominous, and you wondered what was going to be proposed. Did she want you to give him a job? You asked questions, with a careful lack of enthusiasm.
By no means a job, he probably wouldn’t be any good in any job, she explained. What he wanted, and what she prayed for him to have, was a chance to learn and practice his art, his sculpture. She was of course no judge, but he had had high praise from his teachers. He had won a prize in Chicago, and on the strength of it had come to New York. It was a terrific struggle. What he wanted, more than anything else, was to go abroad for two or three years. That was really what she wanted to talk about, she thought you might help.
You considered.
“If he has real talent he certainly should be encouraged,” you agreed judiciously. “Of course, my opinion on that point is no better than your own. If he has, the next problem would be to find a rich man—or woman—to stake him. That might not be very difficult, it’s often done. I might speak to Dick—Mr. Carr—about it.”
It seemed to you that this should sound rather encouraging but she appeared almost to be thinking of something else. She looked at you, directly.
“I thought you might do it yourself,” she said. “You see, you’re his father.”
You stared at her.
“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she went on, “but after all why shouldn’t I? Jim’s dead, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. He was born a few months after we got to Cleveland That was really why we went away, I knew it was coming, and that would have made things worse than ever.”
You stammered. “Can you—that is—I don’t see how you can know—” How odd to be talking like this to this strange little grey-haired woman.
“I know well enough. Oh, it’s sure.”
“What does he look like?”
“Not much like anyone.” She smiled, she was really amused, and that persuaded you more than anything else. “You’ll just have to take my word for it; it’s funny it never occurred to me that you might doubt it. His eyes are a little like yours, but he’s not as handsome as you are. He’s intelligent though, really intelligent.”
She had said he was in New York. He might be in the outer office at this moment. You felt a bit harassed.
“But honestly I don’t see—of course I don’t doubt, I don’t really doubt what you say—but, good lord, I was only a kid, I couldn’t have been more than seventeen—”
Her eyes met yours directly, a little sharply, a little surprised.
“I really am sure, Mr. Sidney,” she said.
“Well.” You got up from your chair. “Well.” You walked to the window and looked down into the street, thirty stories below, and to your desk, and back again. You stood and looked at her, and suddenly laughed. “My god, he’s nearly as old as I am,” you observed. “Do you remember how I always called you Mrs. Davis, and you wanted me to call you Emily and I couldn’t?”
Her answering smile, humorous and friendly, had a tranquility which showed that for her those days were even farther off than they were for you; she had crossed a peak which you had not yet reached.
A thought struck you; a curiosity, no longer a doubt.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it then?”
“I just couldn’t,” she replied. “Once or twice I meant to, but I couldn’t, I don’t know why. It wouldn’t have done any good.” Then, with a flash of that homely playfulness she showed so rarely even in the old days, “Maybe I was afraid you might brag,” she chuckled.
“Of course he doesn’t know?”
“Good heavens no!” She looked at you, her eyes reflecting the quick anxious suspicion in her mind: what if this rich childless man should want not only to help his son, but also to claim him! “No, he doesn’t know. He mustn’t ever know. There’s no reason why he should.”
“None at all,” you reassured her. “It was a foolish question. Of course he mustn’t know. As for helping him—yes, of course. I’d like—”
You hesitated. Certainly there was no more harmless and honest person in the world than this grey-haired schoolteacher, but still, should you perhaps first consult a lawyer? Common prudence…Oh well…
“I’d like to see him,” you said. She agreed at once.
The details were arranged. You and Paul would have dinner together, alone; she thought that would be better. She would tell him that you were an old friend, a former pupil in the Ohio days before he was born, which had the advantage of being true. The evening and hour were agreed upon. You were given Paul’s address.
She arose and held out her hand.
“After I’ve seen him, we’ll meet again and talk things over,” you said.
She nodded, still holding your hand. “You’re a good boy, Will Sidney. You’ve got a good heart. If I don’t want to tell my son who his father is, it isn’t because I’m ashamed of it.” She smiled, but her eyes had tears behind them. “If it weren’t for you I wouldn’t have Paul, and he’s all I’ve got in the world.”
After she had gone you let callers, who were already waiting to see you, wait even longer while you walked back and forth across the room, or stood looking out of the window. This was indeed a voice out of a past which had for long seemed so dreary and monotonous that if the future were to be merely a projection of it, you might as well be dead. So you were a father, you had a son. You found no particular thrill in that; indeed, without having seen him you felt vaguely that you disliked and resented him. But undeniably, here at last was something real, something that you could put your teeth into, something intimate to you with none of that ghastly phantom quality of hollowness and nothingness that had somehow crept into all your relations with people and things, and clung there.
A son twenty-four years old! He wanted to be a sculptor. It was a damn good thing he wasn’t looking for a start in a business career, you’d had enough of that with Larry. This really opened up all sorts of possibilities, which you contemplated with keen pleasure. You could leave Erma and you and Paul could live in a flat somewhere in Greenwich Village. Erma wouldn’t care, or what if she did? Or you could leave the whole damn outfit, the business too, and you and Paul could go abroad and stay there. Apparently that was what Paul wanted to do. You had plenty of money to live on, not of course as you were then living, but still really plenty. Or, as far as that was concerned, you needn’t leave at all; you could tell Erma that you had found a protégé, a promising young sculptor, and that you wanted to bring him to live with you. There was plenty of room. Surely there were teachers for him in New York as good as any in Europe. Erma wouldn’t object, she was always indifferent to that sort of thing.
Suddenly the flow of your thoughts stopped and you laughed aloud, heartily, there in your office alone. No, Erma wouldn’t object. It pleased you, ironically, to put it to yourself in the barest possible words; you couldn’t invite your son to come to live with your wife and you, because she would most certainly seduce him!
You phoned Miss Malloy that you were now ready to see those who were waiting.
Two days later you met him. He stood there in the lobby of the club, hesitant, hat in hand, as an attendant approached him. You knew him at once, and hastened over and extended your hand.
“Mr. Davis? I’m Mr. Sidney.”
Later, seated in the dining room with soup in front of you, you examined him critically. He was rather poorly dressed; his hands were big and strong and not too clean, and his coat-sleeves were too short. His hair and eyes were dark, and his large face gave the impression of having so many features that it hadn’t quite decided what to do with them. Certainly, he didn’t look at all like Mrs. Davis; you thought that he did perhaps resemble you a little, particularly in structure.
“This is fine soup,” he observed. His voice was a little husky, pleasant, and not at all timid.
Now that he was in front of you, no longer to be imagined, you felt much relieved that you hadn’t spoken to Erma, that you had kept all those idiotic schemes to yourself. You were more than ever willing to accept his sonship as a statistical fact, somehow his mere bodily presence seemed to establish it; but at the same time, it demolished the feeling of intimacy your fancy had built up. Hearing him speak and seeing him eat, he was as much withdrawn, as completely circumscribed within his own alien circle, as any of those others.
He seemed perfectly at ease as you talked at random of indifferent things, until with the salad you decided it was time to broach the main subject.
“Your mother tells me you would like to study abroad,” you observed.
“Yes, sir. I would like to. It’s almost essential.” Until then he had not said “yes, sir” since the first few moments.
“Are there better teachers over there than in New York?”
He explained that it wasn’t so much a matter of teachers, it was the stimulation, the atmosphere, the tradition, the opportunity to see the great works of the masters. He talked of all this at length, in a sensible and straightforward manner, you thought, but with an underlying nervousness that betrayed the depth and intensity of his desire. You reflected that at his age you could not have spoken half so clearly and intelligently of your desire to write—nor could you now, for that matter. Also, there was in this boy a purposefulness, a sort of concealed arrogance, which—you smiled—which he certainly had not inherited from his father.
“I suppose,” you observed, “you could make out over there on three thousand a year.”
“Less than that,” he replied quickly, “surely much less. I should say two thousand would be ample. That’s forty dollars a week.
“If there really is a chance of your helping me out,” he went on a little awkwardly, “of course, you would want to find out if I’m likely to deserve it. I haven’t much stuff, a few figures and a group or two, but if you could come down some day and look at them…I told Mother naturally you would want to do that.”
You replied that you would like to see his work, but that it wouldn’t mean anything, you weren’t competent to judge.
Apparently your mind was already made up, for as he went on talking of the difficulties and prospects, and of technicalities of which you knew nothing, you heard little of what he said. You were thinking that three thousand a year—certainly it should be three, it might as well be done right—wouldn’t make any great difference to you. Even if it all had to come out of the half of your salary you were saving, seventeen thousand added every twelve months wouldn’t be so bad. And maybe you wouldn’t have to do that at all. Perhaps you could cut down a little here and there—better still, Erma would certainly contribute half of it, if you cared to ask her, or the whole thing for that matter. But that thought you almost immediately rejected, in disgust. You would do it all yourself, he was your son, wasn’t he?
By the time you parted that evening, you had practically given him your promise, and had arranged to visit his studio the following afternoon but one.
It wasn’t much of a studio—a small room with an alcove on the top floor of an old house in one of those obscure and unsuspected streets west of Seventh Avenue, below Fourteenth. Apparently he both worked and slept there, and perhaps ate too; there was a rusty gas plate and a small sink in a corner, behind a screen made of painted burlap. Clay and plaster figures were scattered about; there was a bronze bust of a young girl, without hair, and two marble groups, one, quite large, of workmen lifting a beam. It seemed to you very big and smooth and impressive.
“I worked nearly two years on that,” Paul said, “and it’s all wrong. See, look here.”
You listened attentively and nodded your head from time to time. He moved a chair for you out from under some sketches and pieces of black cloth, and brought you a cigarette and lit it. After he had finished talking about it you still thought the group big and smooth and impressive. He brought out some portfolios.
“By the way,” he said suddenly, “I almost forgot. Here’s a letter from Mother.” He took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to you.
You opened and read it. It was almost as brief as the one that had come to the office a few days before. She thanked you, and said she knew she need never again worry about her son, and bade you goodbye.
You looked at him in surprise. “Where is she? She hasn’t gone?” He nodded. “Back to Chicago. Yesterday. You see she only had a week off, she has to be back in school Monday morning.” He grinned. “Lord, I’ll bet she’s glad to have me off her hands.”
He opened one of the portfolios and began turning over the sketches, pointing and explaining. You nodded approvingly, thinking of the little grey-haired schoolteacher hurrying back to her bread and butter, leaving her son and her son’s father to wrestle with these deeper problems. You wonder why she hadn’t come to you years before, and whether it would have made any difference. What if she had brought Paul to you before you had married Erma?
He finished with the portfolios and stood in front of you.
“Mother suggested something before she left,” he said doubtfully, “but I don’t know whether you’d care about it. She made me promise to ask you. You see, of course, it doesn’t matter when I leave, and she thought I ought to stay on a month or two and do a bust of you. That is, if you wanted it. I don’t know how good it would be, but I’d like to do it. You have a fine head and a strong face, not at all ordinary. Quite interesting.”
If you had been at all undecided before, which as a matter of fact you weren’t, this would have won you completely. How clever she was, in a simple, direct sort of way.
“She wanted me to propose it as my own idea,” Paul continued, “but I was afraid it would sound impertinent. I’m by no means a mature artist.”
You thought it would seem ridiculous to have a bust made of yourself. A statue. One of Erma, perhaps, and let her pay for it. Or Dick. Or old Mrs. Stanton, she was vain enough, and had more money even than the Carrs. But perhaps Paul wasn’t ready yet for jobs like that. After all, if he wanted to practice on you, why not? If he could do that girl who apparently had had no hair, why not you? Would it be marble or bronze? You had always liked marble better, white marble, you loved its feel, the suggestion of possible movement beneath its firm hardness.
The sittings began the following Monday afternoon.
You told no one about it, not even Erma, particularly not Erma. Not even Jane, though you were at that time seeing more of her than you had for years, on account of the recent illness and death of your mother, the journey to the funeral in Ohio, and Margaret’s difficulties.
None of you had been back to that town since leaving it, though your mother had made several visits to New York. Each time you and Jane had tried to persuade her to stay, and each time, a little older and feebler, she had refused and returned to Ohio, to her sister Cora’s big white house under the maple trees.
You and Jane and Margaret and Rose went out on the same train, and Larry came from Idaho, his first trip east since his departure, five years before. Everything was done before you arrived, nothing was left but the dismal role of polite mourner, for there could be no sharper grief for one who in all essential respects had so long been dead. With Jane, perhaps, for between her and her mother there had doubtless been a closeness of understanding of which the younger children knew nothing. Margaret’s thoughts were obviously back in New York, concerned with her own immediate and pressing dilemma, Rose was as usual preoccupied with her own appearance, and Larry merely sat about helplessly for want of something to do, moving restlessly from the porch to the parlor and back again. The day after your arrival you drove out to the cemetery with a long line of cars behind you, and saw the coffin lowered into a hole beside the mound of your father’s grave.
The following morning, at Jane’s suggestion, you walked down to the square, to the drug store, with her, and stood around for an hour while she conversed with the proprietor—the sucker she had asked you to help take off the hook twenty years before—inspected the counters and shelves, and commented on the additions and improvements. You were invited to go behind the fountain and mix yourself a soda for old times’ sake. You watched Jane with wonder and envy. She actually got a kick out of this! She was genuinely interested to find that the decrepit old cabinet, which had held horse medicine and Villater’s 300 Pills, had been replaced by a shiny new rack filled with little leather books, and to be told that over three thousand of these books had been sold in the preceding twelve months, at a profit of more than six cents each.
You walked back up Main Street together, arm in arm, returning the respectful and compassionate salutations of old friends and acquaintances.
“We sold that store too darned cheap,” observed Jane. “It’s the best location in town, a regular gold mine.”
And yet she was less interested in making money, or having it, than anyone you knew.
That evening all of you left for New York, walking from the big white house where your mother had died to the new brick railroad station, only three blocks away. You had engaged a drawing-room for the three girls and a compartment for yourself and Larry, who, having got as far east as Ohio, had been persuaded by Jane to come on to New York for a visit.
“What’s up between Rose and Margaret?” asked Larry, as you were stowing the bags in the corner of your compartment and taking off your coats, after the train had started. “They act as if they’d like to bite chunks out of each other.”
“They would,” you replied. “Maybe they will. There’s a hell of a row on.”
“What about?”
“Margaret’s going to be a co-respondent and Rose doesn’t want her to.”
Larry, stooping to get a magazine from his bag, straightened up to stare at you.
“Don’t ask me,” you went on hastily. “I really don’t know an awful lot about it, but we’re both due to find out. You might as well chuck your magazine, this trip is reserved for a family council. Jane asked me to come back, and bring you, as soon as we got settled.”
Larry evidently relished the prospect even less than you, and, as a matter of fact, neither of you had any legitimate concern or authority in the business; your embarrassment proceeded naturally from your total lack of function. Jane had been dragged in, inevitably, they had both appealed to her, and it was really Jane you were trying to help. Trying to help Jane!
Your ring at the door of the drawing-room, and your entrance in response to Jane’s summons, evidently interrupted Rose in the middle of a speech. She was curled up on the long seat, smoking a cigarette, her eyes flashing and her mass of short, dark hair artistically rumpled. Margaret, on one of the cross-seats, made room for Larry beside her, and then turned her eyes again on Rose.
“Say it again, so the head of the family can hear you,” she drawled with a glance at you. She turned to Larry. “I don’t really know you, though you’re my brother, but you look like a nice man. Do you believe in sisterly love?”
“Count me out,” said Larry so hastily that everybody laughed, including Rose.
“As far as that’s concerned, me too,” you put in. “There’s no occasion to dig at me, Margaret, I’m the head of nobody’s family. We came back because Jane asked us to.”
“We’ll each talk ten minutes and then we’ll vote,” drawled Margaret sarcastically.
“A lot of attention you’d pay to anybody’s vote but your own,” snapped Rose.
“Bill may not be the head of the family,” said Jane, “but he’s got a better head than any of us. I wish you two Indians had gone to him in the first place. I suggest you leave it to Bill and do as he says.”
“Not for me,” declared Margaret.
“Nor me,” said Rose.
“Thanks,” you said, “I didn’t ask for it.” You made to get up, but Jane put her hand on your arm. “I don’t know what it’s all about anyway,” you went on, “except that somebody’s wife is going to get a divorce by proving that Margaret stole her husband, and Rose is sore, because if her sister’s name is dragged in the mire, she may have trouble marrying a noble scion of the wholesale leather trade.”
This produced a double explosion. Rose shouted above the train’s roar that her fiancé wasn’t a business man at all, that he was of an old and fastidious family, and that, since she had originally met him at your wife’s home, it ill became you to sneer at him; while Margaret declared that she had stolen nobody’s husband, and that he wasn’t just somebody, he was an internationally known scientist and a great man.
“Sure,” agreed Rose, “that’s why it’s such a mess. What the tabloids won’t do!”
“They make the mire, we don’t,” returned Margaret.
“They put you in it, and me too.” Rose appealed to all of you. “I’m not asking her to give up her great man. Though if you could see him…”
“I’ve seen him,” said Jane. “That sort of thing isn’t going to do you any good. That’s what offended Margaret in the first place, and I don’t blame her.”
“Oh, he’s all right,” Rose conceded. “Anyway, all I ask her to do is to keep it quiet somehow, till after I’m married. She could go away for a few months, or at least let him alone and go to live with you or something. She could spend the spring and summer at Larry’s ranch, couldn’t she, Larry?”
Larry stirred and cleared his throat. “Of course, if you want to, Margaret.” He looked extremely uncomfortable.
Margaret had turned in her seat to gaze directly at her younger sister. “Rose, you have a remarkable talent for using offensive and provocative phrases. I don’t know, if it weren’t for that I might have been willing to make a lot of sacrifices for your convenience—but, the lord knows, I’m as petty and human as anybody. ‘At least let him alone!’ Jane knows all about it, but Bill and Larry don’t, and you deliberately try to prejudice them against me, maybe you think they’ll bully me. I’m not going to be bullied, and Doctor Oehmsen and I are going to do exactly what we’ve decided to do, though it will cost him a lot more than it will you or me.” Her voice faltered a little, she bit her lip and stopped. Suddenly she exploded, “You’re a selfish outrageous little beast!” and began to cry.
Larry patted her shoulder with his fingers’ ends, gingerly. Rose, scornful and unmoved, lit another cigarette.
“You are, of course,” said Jane to Rose, “but you always have been, and you know it, so that doesn’t help any. If only Mrs. Oehmsen had made up her mind a year ago it would all be over now.” Jane sighed. “I’ll just have to go and see her.”
“You shan’t!” exclaimed Margaret. “We’re asking no favors from her!”
This started Rose off again. Jane got up to go and sit by her, and you moved next to the window in the cross-seat, looking out at the swift panorama of fields and houses and trees, dim in the twilight, listening to Margaret’s and Rose’s verbal scratches and bites, with Jane trying vainly to soothe them into understanding and decency. You marvelled at the turmoil and fury, at Margaret’s tears and Rose’s flashing eyes; whence, you wondered, all this hot concern with things which in the end freeze us with their indifference?
In a way you envied them. Do you envy them now? Ah, that would be more than tolerable now, that would be blessed, to be again frozen with indifference! What will Rose and her fastidious family say when they hear of this? What will Margaret and Larry—Oh,—Oh, there will be nothing to hear of. Nothing happens, nothing is going to happen that they or anyone will hear of. What if they were all here now, what if they suddenly appeared on the stairs around you? Larry would pat you on the shoulder with the ends of his fingers, and Rose would say, “A nice mess you’ve got the family into! We’d better all stay here while Jane goes upstairs and talks to that woman.” Only, being given to abusive words when aroused, she’d probably say, that whore. So would you, so would you. Jane would go, god bless her. Of course that can’t happen, but you can go to her. You can turn now and go out and go to her, and put your head in her lap—if you could only leave it there forever.…