John Passos - 1919

When Eveline was twelve years old they moved to a bigger house over on Drexel Boulevard. Adelaide and Margaret went east to boardingschool at New Hope and Mother had to go spend the winter with friends at Santa Fé on account of her health. It was fun eating breakfast every morning with just Dad and George and Miss Mathilda, who was getting elderly and paid more attention to running the house and to reading Sir Gilbert Parker’s novels than to the children. Eveline didn’t like school but she liked having Dad help her with her Latin evenings and do algebra equations for her. She thought he was wonderful when he preached so kind and good from the pulpit and was proud of being the minister’s daughter at Sunday afternoon bibleclass. She thought a great deal about the fatherhood of God and the woman of Samaria and Joseph of Arimathea and Baldur the beautiful and the Brotherhood of Man and the apostle that Jesus loved. That Christmas she took around a lot of baskets to poor people’s houses. Poverty was dreadful and the poor were so scary and why didn’t God do something about the problems and evils of Chicago, and the conditions, she’d ask her father. He’d smile and say she was too young to worry about those things yet. She called him Dad now and was his Pal.

On her birthday Mother sent her a beautiful illustrated book of the Blessed Damosel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti with colored illustrations from his paintings and those of Burne Jones. She used to say the name Dante Gabriel Rossetti over and over to herself like traurig she loved it so. She started painting and writing little verses about choirs of angels and little poor children at Christmastime. The first picture she did in oils was a portrait of Elaine, the Fair, that she sent her mother for Christmas. Everybody said it showed great talent. When friends of Dad’s came to dinner they’d say when they were introduced to her, “So this is the talented one, is it?”

Adelaide and Margaret were pretty scornful about all that when they came home from school. They said the house looked dowdy and nothing had any style to it in Chicago, and wasn’t it awful being ministers’ daughters, but of course Dad wasn’t like an ordinary minister in a white tie, he was a Unitarian and very broad and more like a prominent author or scientist. George was getting to be a sulky little boy with dirty fingernails who never could keep his necktie straight and was always breaking his glasses. Eveline was working on a portrait of him the way he had been when he was little with blue eyes and gamboge curls. She used to cry over her paints she loved him so and little poor children she saw on the street. Everybody said she ought to study art.

It was Adelaide who first met Sally Emerson. One Easter they were going to put on Aglavaine and Selizette at the church for charity. Miss Rodgers the French teacher at Dr. Grant’s school was going to coach them and said that they ought to ask Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson, who had seen the original production abroad, about the scenery and costumes; and that besides her interest would be invaluable to make it go; everything that Sally Emerson was interested in went. The Hutchins girls were all excited when Dr. Hutchins called up Mrs. Emerson on the telephone and asked if Adelaide might come over some morning and ask her advice about some amateur theatricals. They’d already sat down to lunch when Adelaide came back, her eyes shining. She wouldn’t say much except that Mrs. Philip Payne Emerson knew Matterlink intimately and that she was coming to tea, but kept declaring, “She’s the most stylish woman I ever met.”

Aglavaine and Selizette didn’t turn out quite as the Hutchins girls and Miss Rodgers had hoped, though everybody said the scenery and costumes Eveline designed showed real ability, but the week after the performance, Eveline got a message one morning that Mrs. Emerson had asked her to lunch that day and only her. Adelaide and Margaret were so mad they wouldn’t speak to her. She felt pretty shaky when she set off into the icybright dusty day. At the last minute Adelaide had lent her a hat and Margaret her fur neckpiece, so that she wouldn’t disgrace them they said. By the time she got to the Emersons’ house she was chilled to the bone. She was ushered into a little dressing room with all kinds of brushes and combs and silver jars with powder and even rouge and toiletwaters in purple, green and pink bottles and left to take off her things. When she saw herself in the big mirror she almost screamed she looked so young and piefaced and her dress was so horrid. The only thing that looked any good was the foxfur so she kept that on when she went into the big upstairs lounge with its deep grey carpet soft underfoot and the sunlight pouring in through French windows onto bright colors and the black polished grandpiano. There were big bowls of freezias on every table and yellow and pink French and German books of reproductions of paintings. Even the sootbitten blocks of Chicago houses flattened under the wind and the zero sunlight looked faintly exciting and foreign through the big pattern of the yellow lace curtains. In the rich smell of the freezias there was a little expensive whisp of cigarettesmoke.

Sally Emerson came in smoking a cigarette and said, “Excuse me, my dear,” some wretched woman had had her impaled on the telephone like a butterfly on a pin for the last halfhour. They ate lunch at a little table the elderly colored man brought in all set and Eveline was treated just like a grownup woman and a glass of port poured out for her. She only dared take a sip but it was delicious and the lunch was all crispy and creamy with cheese grated on things and she would have eaten a lot if she hadn’t felt so shy. Sally Emerson talked about how clever Eveline’s costumes had been for the show and said she must keep up her drawing and talked about how there were as many people with artistic ability in Chicago as anywhere in the world and what was lacking was the milieu, the atmosphere my dear, and that the social leaders were all vicious numbskulls and that it was up to the few people who cared about art to stick together and create the rich beautiful milieu they needed, and about Paris, and about Mary Garden, and Debussy. Eveline went home with her head reeling with names and pictures, little snatches out of operas and in her nose the tickling smell of the freezias mixed with toasted cheese and cigarettesmoke. When she got home everything looked so cluttered and bare and ugly she burst out crying and wouldn’t answer any of her sisters’ questions; that made them madder than ever.

That June after school was over, they all went out to Santa Fé to see her mother. She was awfully depressed out at Santa Fé, the sun was so hot and the eroded hills were so dry and dusty and Mother had gotten so washedout looking and was reading theosophy and talking about God and the beauty of soul of the Indians and Mexicans in a way that made the children uncomfortable. Eveline read a great many books that summer and hated going out. She read Scott and Thackeray and W. J. Locke and Dumas and when she found an old copy of Trilby in the house she read it three times running. That started her seeing things in Du Maurier illustrations instead of in knights and ladies.

When she wasn’t reading she was lying flat on her back dreaming out long stories about herself and Sally Emerson. She didn’t feel well most of the time and would drop into long successions of horrid thoughts about people’s bodies that made her feel nauseated. Adelaide and Margaret told her what to do about her trouble every month but she didn’t tell them how horrid it made her feel inside. She read the Bible and looked up uterus and words like that in encyclopaedias and dictionaries. Then one night she decided she wouldn’t stand it any more and went through the medicine chest in the bathroom till she found a bottle marked POISON that had some kind of laudenum compound in it. But she wanted to write a poem before she died, she felt so lovely musically traurig about dying, but she couldn’t seem to get the rhymes right and finally fell asleep with her head on the paper. When she woke up it was dawn and she was hunched up over the table by her window, stiff and chilly in her thin nightgown. She slipped into bed shivering. Anyway she promised herself that she’d keep the bottle and kill herself whenever things seemed too filthy and horrid. That made her feel better.