Are Parents People?

by Alice Duer Miller

The service went on. It was not until the Second Lesson was being read that Lita, glancing idly toward the ante-chapel, saw that a terrible thing had happened: Her father had arrived too—unexpected and unannounced. He was standing there under the gallery, his hat and stick and gloves all held in one hand, and his mouth just not smiling as he at last contrived to meet her eyes. There they were—her mother looking down at her so calmly from the gallery and her father waiting so confidently for her below, each unaware of the other's presence. What in thunder was she going to do?

Their divorce had taken place a great many years before, when Lita was so young that her mother was not much more important to her than her nurse, and her father very much less so. She was accustomed to the idea of their divorce; but she did wish they were divorced as Aurelia's parents were—quite amicably, even meeting now and then to talk over questions of Aurelia's welfare. Or the way Carrie Waldron's were—each remarried happily to someone else, so that Carrie had two amusing sets of half brothers and sisters growing up in different parts of the country. But Lita was aware of a constrained bitterness, a repressed hatred between her parents. When they said, "Perhaps your father does not quite take in, my dear—" or "I would not interfere with any plan of your mother's; but I must say—" Lita was conscious of a poisoned miasma that seemed to rise from old battlegrounds.

And now, in a few minutes, these two people who had not spoken for thirteen years would come face to face in the cheerful group of parents which every Sunday brought to the school. The few minutes after the service when everyone stood about on the grass outside the church and chatted was a time of public friendliness between three inharmonious classes—parents, teachers and pupils; and there these two dear foes of hers would be, each waiting so confidently to claim her undivided attention. She must prevent it.

She had the sermon to think it out, and for the first time in her life she hoped it would be a long sermon. The preacher, a fine-looking old missionary bishop, with a long upper lip like a lawyer, and a deep-set eye like a fanatic, was going up into the pulpit, turning on the reading light, shaking back the fine frills of his episcopal sleeves.

"My text," he was saying, "will be taken from the eleventh chapter of Isaiah, the sixth verse: 'The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.' The eleventh chapter of Isaiah, the sixth verse."

Well, the text was not inappropriate, Lita thought; but she had no intention of listening. The situation, besides its practical difficulties, brought all the emotion of her childhood's worries and confusions. One of her very earliest recollections went back to a time when her parents still loved each other. She and her mother had been sitting on the floor playing with paper dolls, and suddenly her father had appeared unexpectedly in the doorway—returned ahead of time from a journey. What Lita specially remembered was the way her mother sprang up in one single long motion and flung herself into his arms, and how they had clung together and gone out of the room without a word to her, leaving her conscious, even at four, that she was forgotten. Presently her mother had sent her nurse, Margaret, to finish the game; but the game was already over. Margaret was desirable when one was tired or hungry or sleepy, but absolutely useless at games of the imagination.

After that Lita could just remember days when she would see her mother crying—peculiar conduct for a grown-up person, since grown-up people were never naughty or afraid and could do anything they wanted to do, and did. It shocked Lita to see her mother cry; it was contrary to the plan of the universe. And then, soon after this, her father, as far as she was concerned, ceased to be; and it must be owned she did not greatly miss him.

He ceased to be as a visible presence; but at immensely long intervals—that is to say, once a year, at Christmas—magical presents arrived for her, which she knew came from him. The first was the largest doll she had ever seen. It came from Paris and brought a trousseau in a French trunk. It was an incredible delight. She dreamed about it at night, and could hardly believe each morning on waking that it was reality. The only mitigation of her delight was that her mother did not admire the doll. She said it had an ugly, stary face. Lita, beginning the stupendous task of writing a letter of thanks, with a lead pencil on ruled paper, wrote, "Dear Father: Mother thinks the doll has a stary face, but I love her—" Only Margaret said that wouldn't do, and she had to begin all over again, her round, cramped hand pressing on the pencil until her nails were white.

When she was eight a gold bracelet arrived, set with red stones. This time her mother was even more outspoken. She said to Aunt Minnie, "Of course, she bought it! Isn't it just what you'd expect?" Lita guessed that "she" meant her father's new wife, for she knew vaguely that he had married again and was living abroad. She herself thought the bracelet beautiful; but it was put away, and she was never allowed to wear it. And now, only a little while before, she had seen it in an old jewelry case of her mother's and had been surprised to find it was just what her mother had said it was.

Then two years later a set of sables had come. This, too, her mother had utterly condemned.