John Passos - 1919

All the same he got along very well at school and the teachers liked him, particularly Miss Teazle, the English teacher, because he had nice manners and said little things that weren’t fresh but that made them laugh. Miss Teazle said he showed real feeling for English composition. One Christmas he sent her a little rhyme he made up about the Christ Child and the Three Kings and she declared he had a gift.

The better he liked it in school the worse it was at home. Aunt Beatrice was always nag nag nag from morning till night. As if he didn’t know that he and mother were eating her bread and sleeping under her roof; they paid board, didn’t they? even if they didn’t pay as much as Major and Mrs. Glen or Dr. Kern did, and they certainly did enough work to pay for their keep anyway. He’d heard Mrs. Glen saying when Dr. Atwood was calling and Aunt Beatrice was out of the room how it was a shame that poor Mrs. Savage, such a sweet woman, and a good churchwoman too, and the daughter of a general in the army, had to work her fingers to the bone for her sister who was only a fussy old maid and overcharged so, though of course she did keep a very charming house and set an excellent table, not like a boarding house at all, more like a lovely refined private home, such a relief to find in Trenton, that was such a commercial city so full of working people and foreigners; too bad that the daughters of General Ellsworth should be reduced to taking paying guests. Dick felt Mrs. Glen might have said something about his carrying out the ashes and shovelling snow and all that. Anyway he didn’t think a highschool student ought to have to take time from his studies to do the chores.

Dr. Atwood was the rector of the St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church where Dick had to sing in the choir every Sunday at two services while mother and his brother Henry S., who was three years older than he was and worked in a drafting office in Philadelphia and only came home weekends, sat comfortably in a pew. Mother loved St. Gabriel’s because it was so highchurch and they had processions and even incense. Dick hated it on account of choirpractice and having to keep his surplice clean and because he never had any pocketmoney to shoot craps with behind the bench in the vestry and he was always the one who had to stand at the door and whisper, “Cheeze it,” if anybody was coming.

One Sunday, right after his thirteenth birthday, he’d walked home from church with his mother and Henry feeling hungry and wondering all the way if they were going to have fried chicken for dinner. They were all three stepping up onto the stoop, Mother leaning a little on Dick’s arm and the purple and green poppies on her wide hat jiggling in the October sunlight, when he saw Aunt Beatrice’s thin face looking worriedly out through the glass panel of the front door. “Leona,” she said in an excited reproachful voice, “he’s here.” “Who, Beatrice dear?” “You know well enough… I don’t know what to do… he says he wants to see you. I made him wait in the lower hall on account of… er… our friends.”

“Oh, God, Beatrice, haven’t I borne enough from that man?”

Mother let herself drop onto the bench under the stagshorn coatrack in the hall. Dick and Henry stared at the white faces of the two women. Aunt Beatrice pursed up her lips and said in a spiteful tone, “You boys had better go out and walk round the block. I can’t have two big hulks like you loafing round the house. You be back for Sunday dinner at one thirty sharp… run along now.”

“Why, what’s the matter with Aunt Beatrice?” asked Dick as they walked off down the street. “Got the pip I guess… she gives me a pain in the neck,” Henry said in a superior tone.

Dick walked along kicking at the pavement with his toes.

“Say, we might go around and have a soda… they have awful good sodas at Dryer’s.”

“Got any dough?”

Dick shook his head.

“Well, you needn’t think I’m goin’ to treat you…. Jimminy criskets, Trenton’s a rotten town…. In Philadelphia I seen a drugstore with a sodafountain half a block long.”

“Aw, you.”

“I bet you don’t remember when we lived in Oak Park, Dick…. Now Chicago’s a fine town.” “Sure I do… and you an’ me going to kindergarden and Dad being there and everything.”

“Hell’s bells, I wanta smoke.”

“Mother’ll smell it on you.”

“Don’t give a damn if she does.”

When they got home Aunt Beatrice met them at the front door looking sore as a crab and told them to go down to the basement. Mother wanted to see them. The back stairs smelt of Sunday dinner and sage chickenstuffing. They hobbled down as slowly as possible, it must be about Henry’s smoking. She was in the dark basement hall. By the light of the gasjet against the wall Dick couldn’t make out who the man was. Mother came up to them and they could see that her eyes were red. “Boys, it’s your father,” she said in a weak voice. The tears began running down her face.

The man had a grey shapeless head and his hair was cut very short, the lids of his eyes were red and lashless and his eyes were the same color as his face. Dick was scared. It was somebody he’d known when he was little; it couldn’t be Dad.

“For God’s sake, no more waterworks, Leona,” the man said in a whining voice. As he stood staring into the boys’ faces his body wabbled a little as if he was weak in the knees. “They’re good lookers both of them, Leona… I guess they don’t think much of their poor old Dad.”

They all stood there without saying anything in the dark basement hall in the rich close smell of Sunday dinner from the kitchen. Dick felt he ought to talk but something had stuck in his throat. He found he was stuttering, “Ha-ha-hav-have you been sick?”

The man turned to Mother. “You’d better tell them all about it when I’m gone… don’t spare me… nobody’s ever spared me…. Don’t look at me as if I was a ghost, boys, I won’t hurt you.” A nervous tremor shook the lower part of his face. “All my life I’ve always been the one has gotten hurt…. Well, this is a long way from Oak Park… I just wanted to take a look at you, good-by…. I guess the likes of me had better go out the basement door… I’ll meet you at the bank at eleven sharp, Leona, and that’ll be the last thing you’ll ever have to do for me.”

The gasjet went red when the door opened and flooded the hall with reflected sunlight. Dick was shaking for fear the man was going to kiss him, but all he did was give them each a little trembly pat on the shoulder. His suit hung loose on him and he seemed to have trouble lifting his feet in their soft baggy shoes up the five stone steps to the street.

Mother closed the door sharply.

“He’s going to Cuba,” she said. “That’s the last time we’ll see him. I hope God can forgive him for all this, your poor mother never can… at least he’s out of that horrible place.” “Where was he, Mom?” asked Henry in a business like voice. “Atlanta.”

Dick ran away and up to the top floor and into his own room in the attic and threw himself on the bed sobbing.

They none of them went down to dinner although they were hun gry and the stairs were rich with the smell of roast chicken. When Pearl was washing up Dick tiptoed into the kitchen and coaxed a big heaping plate of chicken and stuffing and sweetpotatoes out of her; she said to run along and eat it in the back yard because it was her day out and she had the dishes to do. He sat on a dusty stepladder in the laundry eating. He could hardly get the chicken down on account of the funny stiffness in his throat. When he’d finished, Pearl made him help her wipe.

That summer they got him a job as bellboy in a small hotel at Bay Head that was run by a lady who was a parishioner of Dr. Atwood’s. Before he left Major and Mrs. Glen, who were Aunt Beatrice’s star boarders, gave him a fivedollar bill for pocket money and a copy of the “Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” to read on the train. Dr. Atwood asked him to stay after the bibleclass his last Sunday and told him the parable of the talent, that Dick knew very well already because Dr. Atwood preached on it as a text four times every year, and showed him a letter from the headmaster of Kent accepting him for the next year as a scholarship pupil and told him that he must work hard because God expected from each of us according to our abilities. Then he told him a few things a growing boy ought to know and said he must avoid temptations and always serve God with a clean body and a clean mind, and keep himself pure for the lovely sweet girl he would some day marry, and that anything else led only to madness and disease. Dick went away with his cheeks burning.