Chapter Thirty-nine

Thanksgiving again. A decade and a half since a sheepish-faced Old Gentleman had faced the bombardment of eyes most immediately concerned with the impending event of another Schuyler about to be born.

There were Schuylers assembled again about the board of the Old Gentleman. This time, a far more meager board in the sagging old house set into a patch of scrubby farm-land that was all shot with rock-stratifications which every so often came to the surface suddenly in sparkling little micaceous platforms.

The latter years of her life were to witness a recrudescence of power in Mathilda that amazed her children and husband even while it dismayed.

She continued to outdo in menial labor any hired-hand that came to the place. As her face paled and shriveled and certain diabetic tendencies began to manifest themselves, the iron power of her hands—at scrub-and-rub over a washtub, at churning, at lugging, at beating rugs, which she flung single-handed across a sill, at red-washing the brick walk that led from the kitchen, at calcimining hen-houses, sawing, smoking hams, salting pork, rendering geese, even to cooking lye in vats for its use about the barns—seemed to mount with the years, rather than decline.[63]

It kept her full of miseries that asserted themselves in backaches and swollen joints and the effects of chilblains which shriveled her valiant face into knots of pain for winter months on end. But there was no restraining the stern flagellation of toil that Mathilda had imposed upon herself, even back in the days when prosperity sat upon her house. Her hands and face were horny with it. In an age when grandmothers had silhouettes and stalked on tall heels, Mathilda was as gray as a moth. A moth with shriveled wings.

Strangely enough, in a way her children hoarded this horny-handed grayness of hers and the faded little streaks of her hair only barely covering the scalp, the corded hands and neck, the furiously wrinkled eyelids, like dried leaves, and the pointed basques she wore all inset with whalebones.

“Thank goodness, Mother has had the sense to grow old honestly,” was one of Bek’s frequent explosions. “If Mother looked like some of the freak old women one sees around, with their puttied-up faces and their diddering about all over the place with swollen ankles that sag down over their French heels, well, I—well, I just don’t know what I’d do.”

“Mother’s got too much sense to make a caricature of herself,” was Phil’s invariable contribution.

“Why, I just wouldn’t feel like I had a mother if I had to fumble around for an unpainted spot to lay a kiss on, the way the Whittier girls do their mother,” trebled sweet Emma.

“I wouldn’t change her for fifty thousand of the green coupons it takes to get a covered vegetable-dish,” was the caliber of the Old Gentleman’s summing it up. Pleasantries like that hit Mathilda right across her hungry heart. He could be so outrageously inconsiderate of her in the trifles. He could have kissed her small, tired feet, out of reverence for her, and yet the slightest compliment he ever paid her was a mocking one, in the key of the covered vegetable-dish.

She regarded him unsmilingly most of the time, sitting mute and unamused at his effulgences.

There was something of a fierce, lean look of hunger in Mathilda’s eyes when she regarded her husband. She adored him. She wanted his caresses. Instead, he gave her persiflage, of this variety, and always in the hearing of others, which cut her even more.

She wanted something else, and the Old Gentleman, who gave so freely, and who would have cut off his right hand rather than hurt her, went on hurting her and did not know.

Forty years of being hurt and feeling herself on the rim of the life of a man by nature more intense, more gregarious, more boisterously alive than she, had taken any semblance of smile out of Mathilda. She regarded her husband, her children, her grandchildren, with solemn, worshiping, terribly concerned eyes. Concern for her husband’s loose, easy ways with what sparse moneys came his way and which he brought to her, except when someone intercepted him first, and placed in her hands like a child. Money she used with frugality and wisdom. Concerns of this sort kept Mathilda’s face a little stern. Concern for a grandchild’s first tooth, a daughter-in-law’s watery damson-preserves, Bek’s astonishing deal with the Governor, the incredible happening of the bringing-home of Henriette Simpson, a bride.[64]

Except for the eighteen-pound turkey gobbler, a basket of grapefruit and oranges which Phil and Rita had brought down from Springfield, Emma’s usual offering of five pounds of hard candies from the St. Louis Busy Bee, and Claire’s candied apples for the children, every dish of that Thanksgiving-dinner-to-eighteen, had been personally prepared by Mathilda.

There were two tables rigged up in the dining-room, another one in the kitchen, and the sewing-table spread in the hall for Rita’s youngest two children and Clara’s twelve-year-old, whom she had brought from St. Louis this time. Even then, neither Bek nor Claire nor Rita nor Mathilda sat down.

Henriette, with high red spots in her lean cheeks and a blue-checked apron on over her spotted-silk foulard (net dickey out!), was eager to join the brigade of the serving women. But the family, all of them aware of what she was unaware, would have none of it. After all, in a way, it was her day, only the seventh after her marriage. And Henry, who was already displaying what were to be, with him, chronic symptoms of concern at tiring her, forced her down into a chair beside the Old Gentleman, who took immediately to serving her with enormous helpings that overwhelmed and indeed defeated the prim appetite of one long accustomed to preparing her own solitary snack-like meals, and then sitting down to table for the lusterless business of dining alone.

And yet, to Mathilda, who drank her mug of felicitous cider to Henriette and Henry, the most outstanding figure of all that Thanksgiving day was the figure of Dave, there among the in-laws and the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, and the aunts; grave and courteous, in the solemn, detached way he had.

There was a lead pendulum to the beat of Mathilda’s heart. David, light of her wintry years—boy who had come to her long after she had ceased to smile, and could only dote silently—boy, who was so strangely, doubly dear with the dual preciousness of child and grandchild. To have begot a child again, after the climactic birth-throes of grandchildren—there was in that something beyond the telling. Not one of her big women daughters, who had borne and borne again, could quite sense that. And what was further beyond the telling, indeed almost beyond the admitting even to herself, was her sense of failure toward David. Her secret fear that she had been a wintry, distant mother to him, full of a sense of embarrassment toward him, the same embarrassment that had flooded her face at another Thanksgiving years before.

He had grown up around her tired old knees. The forest of the knees of the grown-ups. And of all the grown ups, Mathilda had been the most timid with, and of, him. Sometimes a fierce flame of jealous anger flared in Mathilda toward the Old Gentleman. His ability to synchronize with youth. To lean out of years that had never got him in their clutch. Life was not the serious business to the Old Gentleman that it was to Mathilda. Never had been. He was on back-slapping terms with it. It was to his father that Dave brought a joyous and adoring kind of irreverence that Mathilda coveted, in place of the timid kind of tenderness he had for her.

The Old Gentleman and Bek and Henry had somehow, each in a special way, got better acquainted with her boy.

And now, scarcely had she become accustomed to this late visitor into a household that had turned a lean shoulder to him almost from the very year of his birth, than here he was, like all the rest, turning his young face outward and away. Almost before she had begun to know him; begun to dare to know this boy, to whom books and long silences and heavy chores had been the order of his days.

In the same pale, secret way that she had endured the somehow less poignant passing of Phil and Clara, Emma and Bek from the nest of her household, so now must she endure the going of the last of them.

This last of them, who had been born so curiously into two worlds. One foot, as it were, straddling a pre-war and strangely remote universe, the other on a soil that was forever to remain strange to Mathilda. A mad, horrid, fascinating kind of world. A world thumbing its nose at most of the things Mathilda held dear.

David was going out now into it. In a half-dozen ways, he had been the least assertive of her children. Denied practically all of the advantages of the nicely-moderate wealth her others had enjoyed, there was something about his acceptance of the lean, menial days of his youth that could grip Mathilda by the tonsils any time she dared to let her mind dwell upon it.

How denied he had been. Denied even the warm, full breasts at which her other children had suckled. The founts of her being had been dry and runty to the pulling lips of the infant Dave.

He had been her only bottle-babe.

It had cost her secret shame before her husband and family every time she had inserted the viscid rubber nipple of a milk-bottle between his lips. He had not demurred, but had taken even his weaning gratefully. That was Dave all over for you. Had not demurred, but had drunk gratefully.

Then the long, arid days of pasturing, when her other children had enjoyed the advantages of the Centralia schools.

Squalid, pinched boyhood, spent mostly at such past-times as the flat of his back over Henry’s books, or dickering about over his ant-hills, or whooping at the game of Indian-in-the-corn, in a mangy little suit left over from Stevey, or exploring the Pacific Ocean from the top of a knoll in the cow-patch that overlooked the dry, cracked bed of an old duck-pond.

Many an afternoon, gazing from her window, Mathilda had watched him climb, while his handful of sheep grazed, to the mock eminence of the knoll, and there peer with much magniloquence of gesture, and occasionally with an old, lensless pair of Henry’s field-glasses, out over the Pacific of the duck-pond.

She had never known its exact meaning, except that it was one of the toyless games of her lonely and deprived youngest.

All the others seemed to understand better. Henry. Bek. Even Phil, to whom he was now going, would get to know him better. She wanted to know him better. That way. It was to her that he turned with tenderness that was like the laying-on of hands. A diminished-seventh of a difference in his voice. A little bitterly, Mathilda did not want that diminished-seventh. With his father, he was a play-boy, wary alike of the Old Gentleman’s digging humor and the stern old eye of rebuke. To Bek, the boy turned for the swift sure quality of her understanding; and with Henry, this boy of hers was a new boy. Hero worshipper. Climber of mountains. Balboa overlooking the Pacific of his duck-pond. Star-struck with the swimming beauty of planets and the red lamp of Antares. Gripped by the communism of ants. Led by this older brother of the strange wisdoms and the half-smile, into intellectual tourney and jousts long before he knew that they were that.

It was, of course, priceless to have his tenderness. Perhaps, after all, it would have been her choice of the gifts he had to bestow. But, cruel paradox, it nevertheless kept in her heart, ache over David. Ache over what he was to her and over what she could never be to him. There was no time. Her life was too well burned along the wick. And now he was going....

Life was a pecking jackdaw, after her precious morsel.

Dora Tarkington was a pecking little jackdaw after her precious morsel. Mathilda knew! Well, so had she known long before Bek and Phil and Emma and Clara had quite seemed to know these sorts of things for themselves.

Mathilda had known this from the days when, beside her back window of the spacious house on Sycamore Street, she could see David shinny his way through the hole in the hedge.

In all the years of his very young boyhood, during the months and whole winters that he had never so much as clapped eyes upon Dora, Mathilda had known. She knew it now on the eve of his going-away. She knew it bitterly, jealously, longingly, lovingly.

Mathilda loved Dora where Davey was not concerned. But as one of the daws at the precious morsel of her boy, she dreaded her jealously.[65]

All through the whirl of that crowded Thanksgiving in the quarters that were so woefully too small; all through the national performance of the dishing-up the mucilaginous miscellany of stuffed gobbler; jellied cranberries; candied sweet-potatoes; creamed cauliflower; hot biscuit; strained honey; pumpkin, lemon-meringue, and Boston cream-pie; candied apples; crystallized ginger quince-preserves; nut-fudge, and cider—the eyes Mathilda were like scars.

“Blessed are the meek in spirit,” intoned the Old Gentleman, from a tome with all of Mathilda’s multi-colored ribbon book-marks dangling from the end. “For they shall inherit the earth.”

“For they shall inherit the earth,” mumbled Mathilda and the comings and goings of her big-shouldered daughters, eager to unburden her frail hands, began again.

“Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness; for they shall be filled.

“—Sing unto the Lord with Thanksgiving. Sing praises upon the harp unto our God.”

Thank God for Henry! Years of the unreasoning jealousy, born of possessive instinct, that had rankled against Henriette, were dissipated already. It was good that Henry should have taken to himself Henriette as wife. It was right and it was good, and the heart of Mathilda, that had been sore, was rich with an honest gratitude that was fitting unto the day.

Thank God for Henrietta to round out the wise thoughtful years of this strangely practical, absolutely improvident eldest child of hers.

Thank God for the vigor and the grandeur of Bel and the plodding energy of Phil and good Clara of sweet Emma. Thank God for the radiance of grand children and great-grandchildren. Thank God even for Leslie, whom Bek had somehow managed to keep in the sweetness and the light of childhood, until God had taken him back.

Thank God for the flesh of her flesh that crowded this Igrotte house that day.

Thank God for the man with whom she shared all this living, vigorous splendor. Thank God for the vigorous, living splendor of the Old Gentleman himself, whose sense of duty was drawn along his mouth, making it straight as a bolt, and whose sense of humor shimmered in his eyes and made them like hospitable windows inviting the intruder to ignore the bolt and climb the sill.

Thank God—even—for Davey—going away. Thank God, of course, for vesting him with vigorous manhood, the pale, square face, the clear and seeing and sometimes too brilliant eyes. But the Old Gentleman’s mouth of restraint was Dave’s, too. Thank God for that. The time had come—Thank God, of course, for this man-child about to flutter from the sparse, old unfeathered nest. Thank God—of course—ah, yes—Thank God——

It seemed to Mathilda, glancing up over her mumbling lips three or four times as he read the blessing at table, that Thanksgiving Day, that the Old Gentleman’s voice might give out.

It must have seemed that way to Henry, too, who shoved him a glass of water.

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