The home-maker

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Henry and Helen, half-dressed, came hurrying down the stairs to see him before he disappeared for the day. His heart yearned over them, their impressionable, delicate faces, their shadowed eyes, the shrinking carriage of their slim little bodies.

“Good-by, Father,” they said, lifting their sweet children’s lips to his. The poor kids! What business had he to pass on the curse of existence to other human beings, too sensitive and frail to find it anything but a doom. He tried to say, “Good-by there, young ones,” as he kissed them, but the words could not pass the knot in his throat.

He saw Eva start up the stairs and, knowing that she was going to have it out with Stephen, crammed his hat on his head and ran. But not fast enough. As he fled down the porch steps he heard a combative angry roar. Helen and Henry would eat their breakfast to a cheerful tune! And then another scream, more furious, on a higher note. Hell and damnation! There must be something wrong with the way that kid was treated to make life one perpetual warfare. But his father was as helpless to intervene as if he were bound and gagged.

Well, he was bound and gagged to complete helplessness about everything in his life and his children’s lives, bound and gagged by his inability to make money. Only men who made money had any right to say how things should go in their homes. A man who couldn’t make money had no rights of any kind which a white man was bound to respect—nor a white woman either. Especially a white woman. The opinion of a man who couldn’t make money was of no value, on any subject, in anybody’s eyes. The dignity of a man who could not make money—but why talk about non-existent abstractions? He had about as much dignity left him as a zero with the rim off.

His after-breakfast dyspepsia began to roll crushingly over his personality as it always did for a couple of hours after each meal. His vitality began to ebb. He felt the familiar, terrible draining out of his will-to-live. At the thought of enduring this demoralizing torment that morning, and that afternoon, and the day after that and the day after that, he felt like flinging himself on the ground rolling and shrieking. Instead he pulled out his watch with the employee’s nervous gesture and quickened his pace. He was just then passing Dr. Merritt’s office. If only there was something the doctor could do to help him. But he’d tried everything. And anyhow, he understood perfectly that a man who doesn’t make money has no right to complain of dyspepsia—of anything. Illness only adds to his guilt.

He put a soda-mint in his mouth, turned a corner and saw, down the street, the four-story brick front of Willing’s Emporium. Was it possible that a human being could hate anything as he hated that sight and not drop dead of it? Before this new phase it had been bad enough, all those years when it had been a stagnant pool of sour, slow intrigue and backbiting, carried on by sour, slow, small-minded people, all playing in their different ways on the small-minded, sick old man at the head of it. Lester had always felt that he would rather die than either join in those intrigues or combat them. This aloofness, added to his real incapacity for business, had left him still nailed to the same high stool in the same office which had received him the day he had first gone in. That first day when, vibrant with the excitement of his engagement to that flame-like girl, he had left his University classes and all his plans for the future and rushed out to find work, any work that would enable him to marry! Well, he had married. That had been only thirteen years ago! The time before it seemed to Lester as remote as the age of Rameses.

He had hated the slow régime of the sick, small-minded old man, but he hated still more this new régime which was anything but slow. He detested the very energy and forcefulness with which Jerome Willing was realizing his ideals, because he detested those ideals. Lester felt that he knew what those ideals were, what lay behind those “pep” talks to the employees. Jerome Willing’s notion of being a good business-man was to stalk the women of his region, as a hunter stalks unsuspecting game, to learn how to catch them unawares, and how to play for his own purposes on a weakness of theirs only too tragically exaggerated already, their love for buying things. Jerome Willing’s business ideal, as Lester saw it, was to seize on one of the lower human instincts, the desire for material possessions, to feed it, to inflame it, to stimulate it till it should take on the monstrous proportions of a universal monomania. A city full of women whose daily occupation would be buying things, and things, and more things yet (the things Jerome Willing had to sell, be it understood): that was Jerome Willing’s vision of good business. And to realize this vision he joyfully and zestfully bent all the very considerable powers of his well-developed personality. Lester Knapp, the barely tolerated clerk, hurrying humbly down the street to take up his small drudging task, gazed at that life-purpose as he had gazed at the lurid baleful energy of the coal-flames half an hour before.

Lester did not so much mind the way this subtly injected poison ate into the fibers of childless women. They might, for all he cared, let their insane hankering for a cloak with the “new sleeves” force them to put blood-money into buying it, and allow their drugged desire for such imbecile things to wall them in from the bright world of impersonal lasting satisfactions. They hurt nobody but themselves. If the Jerome Willings of the world were smart enough to make fools of them, so much the worse for them. Although the spectacle was hardly an enlivening one for a dyspeptic man forced to pass his life in contact with it.

But what sickened Lester was the unscrupulous exploitation of the home-making necessity, the adroit perversion of the home-making instinct. Jerome Willing wanted to make it appear, hammering in the idea with all the ingenious variations of his advertising copy, that home-making had its beginning and end in good furniture, fine table linen, expensive rugs.... God! how about keeping alive some intellectual or spiritual passion in the home? How about the children? Did anybody suggest to women that they give to understanding their children a tenth part of the time and real intelligence and real purposefulness they put into getting the right clothes for them? A tenth? A hundredth! The living, miraculous, infinitely fragile fabric of the little human souls they lived with—did they treat that with the care and deft-handed patience they gave to their filet-ornamented table linen? No, they wrung it out hard and hung it up to dry as they did their dishcloths.

And of course what Jerome Willing wanted of every employee was to join with all his heart in this conspiracy to force women still more helplessly into this slavery to possessions. Any one who could trick a hapless woman into buying one more thing she had not dreamed of taking, he was the hero of the new régime! That was what Jerome Willing meant when he talked about “making good.” Making good what? Not good human beings! That was the last thing anybody was to think of. And as to trying to draw out from children any greatness of soul that might lie hidden under their immaturity....