Chapter 14
LESTER was glad to see Mattie Farnham come bustling in the very afternoon of the day she returned from Maine. He liked Mattie—indeed he almost loved her—in spite of the fact that so far as he had been able to ascertain she had never yet understood anything he ever said to her. They did not use at all the same vocabulary, but they held friendly communication by means of sign-language, like a dog and cat who have grown up in the same house and have an old affection for each other.
“Hello there, Mattie,” he welcomed her, as she entered. “How are the potatoes in Maine? Ours have spots in them.”
It amused him with Mattie to disconcert her decent sense of what was the suitable attitude to strike. He knew that both she and her husband were relieved to have their ninety-year-old, bed-ridden aunt safely and painlessly in the next world. Blessed if he’d go through the motions of condoling with her.
But he saw at once that he had shocked not her sense of the proper attitude about Aunt Emma but about himself. She had come over prepared to “sympathize” with him. Mattie always had to go through the proper motions.
“How are you getting on, Lester?” she asked earnestly, with her best Ladies’ Guild flatness of intonation. “You can’t imagine how I have worried about you and poor Eva and the dear children. I’ve been sick to think I wasn’t here to help out in this sad time. Now I’m back you must let me do everything I can.”
“You might come and call on Stephen and me once in a while and bring us some of your famous home-cooking,” he suggested mischievously. She laughed, in spite of herself, at his jibe over her weakness for delicatessen potato salad. “You miserable sinner!” she cried, in her own voice, dropping for an instant into their old joking relationship. She sobered at once, however, into what Lester called to himself the “mourners-waiting-for-the-benediction manner” and said, “I was planning as I walked over how I could arrange my own work to have two hours free every afternoon and come here to do for you.”
“You’ll find it all done,” he told her genially. “You can’t beat me to it. Come along all the same, and we’ll play cribbage.” She was perplexed as well as shocked by his levity and at last simply threw herself on his mercy, “Lester, do tell me all about things,” she said in an honest, human tone of affection and concern which brought from him an answer in kind.
“Well, Mattie, I will. It was hell at first ... all the kinds of hell there are. But you know how folks are, how you get used to everything. And I got better, got so it didn’t make me faint away with pain to have somebody touch the bed. And then little by little I settled down to where I am now. Both legs incurably paralyzed, I’m told, but the rest of me all right. In the meantime, Eva—you know how Eva never lies down and gives up—as soon as I could be left, hustled right out and got a job. She’s in the Cloak-and-Suits at Willing’s now, and making good money. What with her commissions on extra sales, she’s making just about what I did. With the promise of a good raise soon. The Willings have treated her very white, I must say. And I imagine she is the wonder of the world as a saleswoman.”
“She would be, at anything!” breathed Mattie devoutly.