III
My father was the youngest son of Captain Arthur Sinclair and was raised in Norfolk. In the days before the war, and after it, all Southern gentlemen “drank.” My father became a wholesale whisky salesman, which made it easy and even necessary for him to follow the fashion. Later on he became a “drummer” for straw-hat manufacturers, and then for manufacturers of men’s clothing; but he could never get away from drink, for the beginning of every deal was a “treat,” and the close of it was another. Whisky in its multiple forms—mint juleps, toddies, hot Scotches, egg-nogs, punch—was the most conspicuous single fact in my boyhood. I saw it and smelled it and heard it everywhere I turned, but I never tasted it.
The reason was my mother, whose whole married life was poisoned by alcohol, and who taught me a daily lesson in horror. It took my good and gentle-souled father thirty or forty years to kill himself, and I watched the process week by week and sometimes hour by hour. It made an indelible impression upon my childish soul, and is the reason why I am a prohibitionist, to the dismay of my “libertarian” friends.
It was not that my father could not earn money, but that he could not keep it. He would come home with some bank notes, and the salvation of his wife and little son would depend upon the capture of this treasure. My mother acquired the habit of going through his pockets at night; and since he never knew how much he had brought home, there would be arguments in the morning, an unending duel of wits. Father would hide the money when he came in late, and then in the morning he would forget where he had hidden it, and there would be searching under mattresses and carpets and inside the lining of clothing—all sorts of unlikely places. If my mother found it first, you may be sure that my father was allowed to go on looking.
When he was not under the influence of the Demon Rum, the little “drummer” dearly loved his family; so the thirty years during which I watched him were one long moral agony. He would make all sorts of pledges, with tears in his eyes; he would invent all sorts of devices to cheat his cruel master. He would not “touch a drop” until six o’clock in the evening; he would drink lemonade or ginger ale when he was treating the customers. But alas, he would change to beer, in order not to “excite comment”; and then after a week or a month of beer, we would smell whisky on his breath again, and the tears and wranglings and naggings would be resumed.
This same thing was going on in most of the homes in Maryland and Virginia of which I had knowledge. My father’s older brother died an inebriate in a soldiers’ home. My earliest memory of the home of my maternal grandfather is of being awakened by a disturbance downstairs, and looking over the banisters in alarm while my grandfather—a Methodist deacon—was struggling with his grown son to keep him from going out when he was drunk. Dear old Uncle Harry, burly and full of laughter, a sportsman and favorite of all the world—at the age of forty or so he put a bullet through his head in Central Park, New York.