The Squirrel-Cage

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Paul finished his figuring, pushed the papers to one side with a sigh of fatigue, and turned his eyes thoughtfully on his wife. “That’s very good news of yours, Lydia dear, about the expected son and heir. But it’s rather a pity it didn’t come last winter, isn’t it?”

“How so?” she asked.

“Why, you had to be out of things on account of being in mourning, anyhow. If this had happened the year your father died, you could have killed two birds with one stone, don’t you see?”

Lydia’s perception of a thousand reasonable explanations and excuses for this speech was so quick that it was upon her almost before she was aware of her resentment. She hurried to shut the door on a blighting new vision of her husband, by telling herself loudly that it was to be expected Paul should feel so; but, rapid as her loyal, wifely movement had been, she had felt a gust of hot revulsion against something in her husband which her affection for him forbade her to name.

She could not put out of her mind, his look, his accent, his air of taking for granted that the speech was a natural one. The knowledge that Marietta would be too bewildered by her dwelling on the incident even to laugh at her, did not avail to free her of the heavy doubts that filled her. Was she mistaken in feeling that it indicated an alarming increase of materialism in Paul? She was really too fanciful, she told herself many times a day, surprised to find herself going over it again. Was it a mere chance remark—a little stone in the garden path—or was it the first visible outcropping of a stratum of unconquerable granite which grimly underlay all the flower beds of his good nature?

The final impression on her mind was of a new motive for coming to a better, closer understanding with Paul about the fundamentals of their life. It had not occurred to her before, in spite of all her struggles “to be good,” as she put it to herself with her childlike naïveté, that Paul might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents that filled their days.

If she could only get close to Paul she was sure that all would be well. She made herself hope, with a brave belittling of the tangle that baffled her, that perhaps just one long, serious talk with Paul would be all that was needed. If she could just make Paul see what she saw, he could tell her how to set to work to remedy things. Paul was so clever. Paul was always so kind—when he saw!

She began watching for a favorable opportunity for this long, serious talk, and as day after day fled past with only a glimpse of Paul desperately in a hurry in the morning and desperately tired at night, she was aware that her idea of the shape their life was taking had not exaggerated the extent of the broad flood of trivialities that separated them. Although the light laugh of her girlhood was rarer than before her marriage, life had not proved it to be the result of mere animal spirits. She still saw a great deal to laugh at, though sometimes it was tremulous laughter, carrying her to the edge of tears. And she often laughed to herself during these days at the absurd incongruity of what her heart was swelling to utter and the occasions on which she would have to speak.

’Stashie was away, tending her aunt who was ill, away for an indefinite period, for Patsy’s steady wages quite sufficed to keep his cousin at home to care for his grandmother. Lydia sometimes feared the satisfaction she took in Patsy’s exemplary career was tinctured with vainglory for her own share in it, but, if so, she was punished for it now, since it was his very prosperity that took away from her the only steady domestic help she had ever been able to keep. She had now only a cook, a slatternly negress, with a gift for frying chicken and making beaten biscuit, and a total incapacity to conceive of any other activity as possible for her. Lydia had telephoned to the two employment agencies in Endbury and had been informed, by no means for the first time, that the supply of girls willing to work in the suburbs had entirely given out. For the time being there was simply not one to be had, so for the next few days Lydia, as well as Paul, was more than usually occupied; but her fixed intention to “talk things over with him” was not shaken. And yet—day after day went by with the routine unvaried—there was no time in the morning; in the evening Paul was too tired, and on Sundays there was always “Company,” it being practically their only time for daylight entertainment. Often Paul brought a business associate home for dinner; his family or hers came in; there were always callers in the afternoon; and they were usually invited out to supper or had guests themselves. It was the busiest day of the week.

Ever since her father’s death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a not uncommon occurrence in her childhood—a school picnic in the Black Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of her mother. How proud she had been to have him there! How eagerly she had done the honors of the “entertainment”! How anxiously she had hoped that he would be pleased with the recitations, the songs, the May-day dance!