IV
It quickly developed that she had a passion for soap clubs and a dangerous propensity toward buying from agents. The former was the more harmless for some deliberation was usually given to premiums. But those agents!
Milly bought a twelve-volume set of encyclopedias “on time” before she and Nathan had found a bedroom carpet. She bought several “shrieking” rugs from Armenian peddlers and a banquet lamp in anticipation of domestic equipment to be requisite when the Forges had attained to banquets. She was imposed upon for patent mops and cheated on carpet beaters. She laid in enough stove polish to shine all the baseburners in Paris County. Nathan came home one night and found himself in debt for an upright piano, twenty dollars down and five dollars a month until death. Milly thought it was “just simply grand” and contracted to begin music lessons before she had sheets enough for her beds.
But her wildest orgies were carried on in the depths of the local “five and ten.”
Milly swore by F. W. Woolworth as by a savior. Nathan gave her fifty dollars to temporarily furnish her pantry, more money than she had ever held in her hands at one time in all her past life. Twenty-five dollars she “slipped” to her mother to get all her younger brothers and sisters some shoes. With the other half she “descended” on the five-and-ten.
She bought all her dishes and pantry ware from the five-and-ten. She bought ribbons, pictures and three cardboard wastebaskets. She bought flour sifters that wouldn’t sift and tack pullers that wouldn’t pull. She procured a huge cambric bag and came home each night, straining beneath it or with a young brother pulling it on his sled. Saturday afternoon she had twenty-five cents remaining. She hunted the five-and-ten anxiously for five articles of a nickel apiece which “might come in handy around the house.” Her last purchase was a half-dozen lead pencils. They slipped from her moth-eaten muff before she reached her gate however.
The Forge home became a jumble of nothing in particular but in character somewhat weird. A mahogany rocker, a mission center table, a golden-oak what-not (secondhand) and a gilt corner chair were exhibits A, B, C and D in the front room. The walls of the house not hung with small ten-cent pictures were spattered with colored postcards on big pins,—from Savin Rock or Nantasket Beach. The chaotic total of all this shabby gentility shocked Nathan when he beheld it. He decided it was a lack of money. He didn’t possess enough to furnish a home like the Seavers of previous mention. But he did make a start the first Christmas by surprising Milly with a quartered-oak Victrola to harmonize with the mission center table, the idea being to unify eventually the scheme of the room as more bizarre effects could be culled out. But three things happened to the Victrola with lamentable swiftness. First, Milly decided it wasn’t the center table she wanted the Victrola to match; it was the installment piano. So without consulting Nathan she went as usual to the “five-and-ten” and bought a half-dozen cans of “paint” whose outer labels bore some resemblance to the color of the piano. The effect on the beautiful, dull, mission finish was not at all what Milly had anticipated; in fact, the Victrola looked as though it had weathered a bad attack of cherry measles. The painting was still a casus belli in the Forge “parlor” when Jake Richards’ youngest child pulled out most of the records one Sunday afternoon and broke them; they “cracked with such a nice noise!” Lastly, young Tommy Richards decided during an after-school visit to his sister that something ailed the “works” of the Victrola and they emphatically needed fixing. So he dug out an alarming array of “five-and-ten” tools, everything in fact but an ax, and proceeded to “fix” them. The novelty of it palled on him after he had pinched a finger, and he deserted the science of melodious mechanics entirely when he unscrewed a mysterious metal compartment and the mainspring exploded in his face. Mechanically speaking, he got beyond his depth. He discreetly vanished and the Victrola sang not again.
Nathan’s first quarrel of note with Milly resulted from the appropriation of the married sister’s home by the Richards tribe as an extension of their own. My friend made the additional discovery common to many men who have wedded Sex instead of Ladyhood, that he had also married the girl’s family. As soon as Milly had sorted out her Woolworth dishes and run up a thirty-dollar bill at the Red Front Grocery, she affected to demonstrate her housewifery by inviting all of that family to dinner,—Sunday dinner. And her family came. Great was the coming thereof.
Nathan held a dim idea there had been various brothers and sisters in the Richards house across the “flats.” But that first Sunday dinner was a revelation—likewise the alarming quantities of food it required to satiate them. The Forge larder reasonably resembled “a land overflowing with milk and honey” before they came. After they had gone, that thirty-dollar commissary had been attacked as by a plague of Egyptian locusts. Nathan, however, had not begrudged the food. What bothered him most was their methods of assimilation. There had been little or no table etiquette at Johnathan’s house. But such as it had been, it was courtly beside the demonstration in “manners”, or lack of them, revealed at that first Sunday dinner as well as in many hectic repetitions.
When the Richards tribe recovered from their awe of Nathan, discovered him quite a mortal being with two arms, two legs and a propensity to consume food at conventional intervals like themselves, they “pitched in.” The younger children squalled and fought over smaller delicacies. Two of them enjoyed a pleasing altercation with pieces of baked potato. Mother Richards held the baby against a moist breast and allowed the little barbarian to pull a plate of soft squash pie into her lap. This was lamentable but cute. Undoubtedly Nathan had pulled a plate of soft squash pie into his mother’s lap at “thirteen months.”
Nathan took issuance with old Jake one Sunday, however, for producing a flat, brown hip-flask and using copious draughts therefrom to “give him an appetite.” Thereafter old Jake “made his vittles set right” with more. The lad, sick of the whole Richards tribe, at the frayed end of his patience generally, advised old Jake in hot phrases to work up his appetites and make his vittles set right with alcohol elsewhere,—never to repeat the disgusting performance in his home again. A dour time followed. Old Jake had imbibed enough to be quarrelsome. Milly took her father’s part. She called Nathan a hypocrite because “he couldn’t stand the sight of a little hooch.” It was her house as well as Nathan’s and if Nathan didn’t like it, she guessed she knew what he could do. Which Nathan did. He grabbed old Jake by turkey neck and trouser seat and threw him out into the mud. Old Jake’s flask and hat followed. So did the Richards tribe, though they went voluntarily and sidestepped the mud. They swore they had been insulted; they would never set foot in Nathan’s house again. But a month later they were back; old Jake had apologized, he had said “blood was thicker than water” and it didn’t pay to hold grudges. And they descended on the large assortment of table delicacies purchased the previous evening at the Élite Bakery and ate until the boy wondered if sheer hunger hadn’t driven them back. He thought they must conserve their appetites during the week to distend their stomachs on Sunday noon at his expense.
The same superficial logicians who would acclaim Nat a weakling for not leaving his father to learn his lesson at the box-shop would undoubtedly have the boy kick his way out of the domestic slough in which he had slipped now, get divorced and make a fresh start elsewhere. Very good indeed for those able to see the situation in perspective or whose enlightenment permits them so to decide the matter for their own gratification. Nathan could not see the situation in any perspective; he had little training and less enlightenment to help him decide any matter; he only knew that in his heart was a blind, piteous groping for something higher and better, knew instinctively that this sort of thing was not for him and that he had blundered, blundered horribly. But how to correct that blunder was quite another question.
There was a baby coming!
The lad couldn’t bring himself to cast aside or leave a woman “in Milly’s condition” as Mother Richards sighed over it. One narrow mistake, made far back the day Mrs. Forge had whirled on her small son and scared him so badly anent sex, had been followed by another and another. As he grew older, blunder after blunder had rolled up, like a ball of soft snow juggernauting down hill. Now he was about to become a father, temperamentally a pathetic mixture of half man, half boy himself. No, he could see no self-justification in separating from Milly. Not then. And things went from bad to worse.
The baby was born and any neatness and housewifery which Milly may have shown before its arrival were quickly dispensed with, “caring for baby.” Milly apparently spent whole days and weeks “caring for baby.” Her floors went unswept and her dishes went unwashed. Nathan subsisted on various sticky pastries procured from the Élite Bakery. With increasing frequence he was advised frankly to “go up town and get his supper” because “care of baby” had so preoccupied the shining hours that Milly hadn’t even had time to do up her hair. Which was self-evident. If she “did up her hair” twice a week, she performed the extraordinary. She “twisted it up for comfort” in the morning and it was still twisted up for comfort when she retired at night. And Milly was always overworked, frightfully overworked. She said so. Nathan had to listen. All this, while Johnathan was doing his utmost at the factory to show his son that he was wrong in everything on general principle and all the trouble between father and son was Nat’s conceit, incorrigibility and inherent animosity against “retrenchment.”
Nathan had heard somewhere about the queer, constricted twinge which comes to a father who feels the tiny fingers of his first-born grip his own. Nathan felt no such twinge. The baby was born at the Richards’ home across the “flats.” Nathan had wished his wife to go to the local hospital but Milly was shy of hospitals. She called them “butcher shops.” Nathan ate his meals at the Élite the week preceding the great event and slept in an unmade bed in a slovenly house. Then one mid-afternoon young Tom burst into the box-shop office. Excitedly he accosted Nathan.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Yer kid’s come! An’ I lost my bet with Mickey Sweeney. I said it was gonna be a boy and the darn thing’s cost me thirty cents!”
Nathan went at once to the “house across the flats.” The baby was much in evidence, or its lungs were. Nathan thought it sounded like the Victrola when the needle ran off and played one horrible sound over and over.
The child looked like a worm and was hideously homely. Mrs. Richards refused to let him take it. He could see Milly “sometime to-morrow.”
He went back to the shop. Six men had “walked out cold” because Johnathan had seized upon his enforced absence to insist they load a freight car his way and in the defiance of a method Nathan and the men had spent months in perfecting.
“Huh! Father, are you?” sniffed Johnathan. “And the milk isn’t wiped off your own chin yet. A father! Fiddlesticks!”
Five years of this, incredible as it may seem, and now the box-shop had gone the way of all flesh.
Nathan slept in the dark, old Caleb and myself the only sincere friends he had on earth.
Oh, Mediocrity! What crimes against youth may be committed in thy name!