Chapter Seven

Phil was the first of the Schuylers to go chubby, as the saying is. So rotund, in fact, that in his middle thirties, his waist-coat, that was usually a none-too-subtle check of plaid, buttoned over a semicircle. He was a teetotaler, from inclination rather than conviction, but there was something in the veininess of Phil’s face and the drape of flesh over the back of his collar that suggested alcohol.

There was an air of too-high blood-pressure about him. His face red and his voice a little breathless. At thirty, Phil Schuyler had twice been almost a rich man. The elusiveness of his quest glittered in his eyes. It was as if in attempting to force his destiny, he had antagonized it.

“Anything very special, Bek?” he said, through the light peck he deposited on his sister’s cheek, as she ran considerably ahead of the others to greet him.

“They’re after Henry again. District Attorney this time.”

“Suspected as much. Well, he’s got to take it. If he doesn’t feel he owes it to himself, he at least owes it to the family. Man can’t go through life turning down one honor after another. Howdy, Father. Well, Mother! Careful! There’s some geranium-cuts in this paper bag Rita sent along for your side-yard borders. No, Rita decided not to come. Baby seemed a little croupy last night. Well, Father, am I to ride in the one-hoss shay?”

“Better men than you have ridden in it.”

“Dirty crack!” cried Phil, who was accustomed to his father’s easy irascibilities where he was concerned.

“Puppa—Phil was only teasing.”

“Well then, so was I.”

“’S all right, Father. You’re immense.”

“So are you.”

“Now, Father, don’t taunt me for my figure. Who’s giving me a lift?”

“I’ll drive you home, Phil. I can bound Ohio—Ohio is——”

“Can you bind my kitten’s broken paw?”

“Phil!”

There ensued then the usual family-conclave, Emma bidding for Phil to sleep in her spare-room, where he could have steam-heat, Mathilda demurring that Phil’s old room in the House on Sycamore Street was ready and the fire laid. Claire threw her young arms around her uncle’s neck and begged him to wait for Stevey’s train and then to ride up in the Cadillac, David meanwhile lugging his uncle’s valise, and almost toppling backward with effort, toward the phaeton.

“No, never mind anybody waiting for Stevey’s train, Phil. Claire and Emma will drop you and Mother at the House on Sycamore Street. Davey and I will wait for Stevey.”

As she spoke, Rebekka’s eyes, round as two pinwheels, had come to full stop upon her niece Claire.

“Go, Claire.”

“But, Aunt Bek,” faltered Claire, her blonde skin pinkening furiously. “But, Aunt Bek....”

“Run along,” said her aunt and laid a firm, a heavy, an uncannily aware hand upon the small, frail shoulder of her niece.

“But....”

“Claire!”

“But, Aunt Bek—my own cousin—coming——”

“A good thing to remember, Claire. Your—own—cousin.”

“Oh, you—” almost sobbed her niece, and ran after the others, with her handkerchief pressed against her lips—“you’re—terrible to me.”

The family shooed off before Bek, with an automatic kind of acquiescence.

There were only Davey and Bek left standing, wind-blown, on the platform, as the five-fifteen, bearing Stevey, drew in.

How handsome Stevey was as he stepped off the day-coach, in his slip-over sweater and a pigskin bag and a tennis-racquet in a case and his cap crammed into his pocket so that his hair, Winslow’s waviness and baby-fine brown, blew backward giving him a swift, winged look.

Stevey was really David’s eldest nephew. Leslie somehow did not count, as ages go. A lean-jawed young fellow, with his father’s sensitive nostrils and his mother’s level mouth. Gray-eyed, with the depth to them that black lashes can lend; as indefinable a tang to an expression, as the flavor of the caper to sauce. Personable, after a fashion, cut along lines rather lighter than the Schuyler heft, wide-shouldered, light-waisted, with something correct about the line from femur to ankle that was not characteristic of the House of Schuyler in general.[11]

“How handsome he is!” thought Bek even when he could not quite meet her gaze in greeting. She wanted to take him in her arms, except that it would have embarrassed them both. For one second it flashed over her, as he made a quick movement of greeting, that the returning prodigal might be going to take her in his. Flashed over her in a warm goose-flesh. Of course, Stevey did nothing of the sort. People did not take Bek in their arms. He did exactly what she gave him the cue to do.

“Hullo, Mother,” said Stevey, and flung out for her hand and shook it low, down and vigorously. “Hi. Unk,” and caught up Davey by the armpits, as he was forever being caught up.

“Stevey, I can bound Ohio.”

“Bound it tomorrow!”

“Stevey, me and Henry have a chart and we followed the American fleet around the world with the red pins.”

“—as well as with breathless interest.”

“And, Stevey, I know where the American fleet was on February twenty-first. Ha-waiian Islands, and Teddy fired a salute to Mo-lo-kai where the lepers live. If I was a leper, I could get fired a salute at by Teddy. Know what?”

“Dave, you run home now! Bek is going to drive Stevey home for Winslow, and then we’ll all be over to Sycamore Street in time for supper.”

“Can I have a houn’-dog out of Tom Willet’s litter, Bek?”

“No, those Willet dogs are always flea nests.”

“The flea is a para-sit-ic animal that lives off——”

“Good Lord!” cried Steve and tossed him again. “Go tell your Brother Henry to get you bound in a soft-leather edition and sell you from door to door.”

“Run along, Davey, there’s a good boy, and tell Mother not to bother about the sweet butter. I’ll stop by Koerber’s and bring a pat. Jump in, Stevey.”

How easily as Davey with his short legs spun off toward Sycamore Street, Stevey swung into the seat beside his Mother, not bothering to open the door, just one long lithe leg after the other climbing over it.

“Shall I drive, Mother?”

“No,” said Bek, and threw a clutch that jerked them forward.

The town in its cold March drabs was a one-colored affair. Sky the color of the weather-beaten boards that houses and fences and many of its sidewalks were built of, dry wash in back yards half-frozen and flapping stiffly gray, against gray sky, streets merging off, with scarcely a change of gray, from the smoothness of made into the roughness of unmade roads.

Down Second Street, Beulah Kohn still swung on the broken front gate.

“Hello, Miss Bek. Hel-lo, Stevey.”

“H’lo. Stevey, that’s Beulah Kohn, the one with meningitis. Poor child, speak to her.”

“Hel-lo Beulah,” called Steve, and tried to smile through a face that, once alone with his mother, had grown stiff-looking and white.

At the wheel, Bek’s hand, ungloved now, was large and calm and pliable-looking as a surgeon’s. But inside, against the palm, it was throbbing.

“Nobody knows anything, Stevey. Not even your father. The dean’s letter came so—sudden, son. Your father might just as easily have been the one to open the mail-box and—find it first!”

Steve moved his lips, but nothing came.

“I—I’ve explained to everybody that I want you home—while they’re building the dam. Practical observation—irrigation, y’see?”

His face only whitened and tightened, and his lips handsome when in repose, shirred inward now, like a scar. Out of the tail of her eye, as she drove, Bek could see the young face becoming old. Terrifyingly old. A scarred old walnut of a face.

“I’m no good, Mother. Sooner or later you’ll have to reconcile yourself to everybody knowing that.”

“I’ll fight you to the finish,” said Bek, on a click of teeth, “before I’ll make up my mind that a child of mine is no good.”

“It gets me, Mother. It burns me. It makes a human bonfire out of me. There ought to be some cure for it, like there is for ulcers and scalds and hydrophobia. It gets me. Help me, Mother!”

“Help me, Mother!” At that, a cry that suddenly became the cry of the wind in her ears as they sped along; there lodged in Bek’s throat a ball of ache, so that it was a block before she could muster voice. Her kind of dead-level voice without flutter to it.

“I’ll fight with you, Stevey.”

“Help me, Mother!” Why, to Bek, trying not to wobble the wheel, that was a cry in the wilderness. It smote her. It cut her in two. It made her veer so suddenly, as she crossed Second Street, where it intersected Elm, that Skeet Mapey, the sixty-year-old police man on that beat, shook an unaggressive old finger at her, as they shot past him.

“I’ll help you, Stevey, to help yourself. You hear me! No one can help you but yourself.”

“Then I’m lost,” said Stevey, and quite horribly began to cry, sitting there with his face twisted and his lips a knot-hole, and his chin all tucked up like a weazened little old man’s.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Bek kept saying to herself. “Help me to help this boy! God, you—help me to help this boy!” She had the rather disembodied feeling of everything within her stopping like a run-down clock. A momentary inability to think or feel or do. A deadness, as if circulation and heartbeat and the universe of her body had ceased.

“You can do everything, Mother. Save me.”

That warmed one back, somehow.

“Is it so terrible, boy?”

“It burns, Mother. Not like anything you’ve known. It cracks one’s tongue, and then one’s whole body is like a cracked tongue—thirsting. You can’t know—ever——”

“God knows, no, Stevey. Never in our family—anyone—anywhere—or in your father’s—no one ever——”

“It’s like being lined with hot steel, Mother, that you want to cool by making hotter. Or go crazy! Or go crazy! It’s hell, Mother. You’re too strong to understand.”

“Too strong to understand.” There it was again. The alienating power of strength. Too strong to understand, when the hand with which she steered so surely was of flaming steel. The same flaming steel that tortured Stevey.

“Oh, Stevey—tell me. Tell Mother. Before we get home. Nobody must know. But you, Stevey, and me. We’ll fight it out. How did it happen again? So suddenly—you promised....”

“Not suddenly, Mother—for a little while nobody there knew—that was all——”

“Stevey, Stevey—as a child—as a little boy—you never even saw it around you, and now—now this——”

“Never—except Gramp——”

“Gramp!”

“No. No. I mean, first I remember ever seeing the stuff at all—Gramp used to keep a jug of cider in the phaeton for long drives—winter-time. I remember once or twice taking a swig or two out of it if he fell asleep at the reins. Remember, he used to think it amusing and cute for me to do that. Way back there—me a kid—it used to warm me, Mother, in a way I hadn’t ever felt before. I’ve always felt cold inside. Remember how you used to fix me hot lemonades with mint in? ... that was because I craved it. Even then. Warmth. Remember me always sucking peppermints? That was it, Mother. The burning. The burning.”

“Oh, my boy!”

“That time you found me by the mill—that was the first time, Mother—I was—that way. I’ve sworn that to you so often. You must believe.”

“I do.”

“And then—and then—after you got me away—the first three months—I didn’t—not a drop——”

“That’s why, Stevey, when it came—so sudden—I had thought—you were all right, boy——”

“Mother, those first months. The torture. No wonder my marks were so bad. Mother, you’ll never know. I used to get up at night—and run—Mother—go out and run around the track—until they began to get on—and think me nutty. I tried so terribly, Mother.”

“Stevey! Stevey!”

“And then—the fellows—they began to rush me for Beta Beta. That was the real beginning. I hadn’t even seen the stuff around, before I began to get in with the frat crowd. And then seeing it—in bottles—on tables—help yourself. The night they initiated me, I—that was the beginning.... Ugh.... Mother——”

That cry in the wilderness. The rumble of the tinny little car over it.

“Shame, shame, Stevey.”

“Oh! Oh, Mother, if you only knew! If I had any guts—I’d kill myself!”

“No. No. No. Stevey, I’ll help you. Mother will help you.”

“You will, Mother. You will, won’t you?” And sobbed, without troubling to cover his face, which somehow was most horrible of all to her.

“Father—what will he——”

“He mustn’t know, Stevey.”

“I couldn’t stand his knowing, Mother. Father so—so sensitive—so nervous—I—he couldn’t stand it!”

“Father so sensitive. So nervous.” What was the secret of Winslow, Bek asked herself. Not bitterly, but out of an enormous wistfulness and fatigue.

“We’ll make our fight together, Stevey. I’m not afraid, Stevey—if you’ll fight with me. We’ll win!”

“I will fight, Mother. There’s a bottle of—it—wrapped in a green sweater in the bottom of my bag. Take it away from me, Mother.”

“You’ll win, Stevey, like that! You’re a Schuyler, son. There may be families in the state hold their heads higher, but not any straighter. Look at Davey, Steve. I always say he’s everything in us summed up. Seventh child, I guess. Sturdy. Square. That’s us.”[12]

“Yes, Mother.”

“We’ve got to keep the family fine enough for him to grow up into, son. Ever think of that? Hello there, Supe. Stevey, that’s old Lem Dinwater’s boy. Speak to him. Supe, you tell your Pap to make me another offer on that hog corn. He’s going to lose a good chance not giving me a price on that feed. Good boy!”

“My Pap says you’n him can’t do no business, Miss Bek. My Pap says you’re a better man ’n he is.”

“Hop out here, Stevey, and into the drug-store, and get me a bottle of Sloan’s Liniment. One of my new mares has gone right lame in her foreleg. Never mind, I’ll hop out myself. I want to see how Granny Koerber’s asthma is today.”

“Mother, won’t that keep? How can you—now!”

“No, Stevey. My mare’s limping. Those things don’t keep.”

“But, Mother....”

“Open your suitcase there under the seat, boy. There’s something in it wrapped up in a green sweater. A bottle of something I want to make a present of it to Granny Koerber for her asthma.”

FOOTNOTES: