The home-maker

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

That sudden contact with Stephen’s utterly unsuspected suffering had been like dropping his fingers unawares upon red-hot iron. His reaction had been the mere reflex of the intolerable pain it gave him. Now, in the long quiet of his sick-room, he set himself to try to understand what it meant.

So that had been at the bottom of Stephen’s fierceness and badness in those last days of the old life. So it had been black despair which had filled the child’s heart and not merely an inexplicable desire to make trouble for his mother. For Heaven’s sakes, how far off the track they had been! But however could they have guessed at the real cause of the trouble? What possessed the child to keep such a perverse silence? Why hadn’t he told somebody? How could they know if he never said a word.

He thought again of the scene in the bathroom that last morning and saw again Stephen’s wistful face looking up into his. Stephen had tried to tell him. And those sacred itemized accounts of Willing’s Emporium had stopped his mouth.

But Evangeline was always on hand. Why hadn’t Stephen....

Without a word, with a complete perception that filled all his consciousness, Lester knew why Stephen had never tried to tell his mother.

And yet—his sense of fairness made him take up the cudgels for Eva—it hadn’t been such an unreasonable idea of hers. Teddy was certainly as dirty as it was possible for anything to be. You have to keep children clean whether they like it or not. Suppose Teddy had been played with by a child who had scarlet fever? They’d have to have him cleaned, wouldn’t they? He’d gone too far, yielded to a melodramatic impulse when he’d promised Stephen so solemnly they’d never have anything done to Teddy that he didn’t like.

But as a matter of fact Teddy never had been near scarlet fever or anything else contagious. And even if he had, weren’t there ways of dry-cleaning and disinfecting that would leave the personality of the toy intact? You didn’t have to soak it in a tub of soapy water. What was the matter with wrapping it in an old cloth and baking it in the oven, as you do with bandages you want to sterilize. If anybody had had the slightest idea that Stephen felt as he did.... But nobody had! And that was the point.

He saw it now. Nothing turned on the question of whether Teddy should or should not be cleaned. That purely material matter could have been arranged by a little practical ingenuity if it had occurred to anybody that there was anything to arrange. The question really was why had it not occurred to anybody?

What was terrifying to Lester was the thought that the conception of trying to understand Stephen’s point of view had been as remote from their minds as the existence of the fourth dimension.

And even now that the violent shock of this little scene with Stephen had put the conception into his brain, how under the sun could you ever find out what was felt by a child who shut himself up so blackly in his stronghold of repellent silence?