On the Stairs

by Henry Blake Fuller

The child-element, of late, had not been large in her life. Her two tall stepsons were flourishing in absence; she had had no second child of her own; little Althea was nice enough, and she liked her pretty well.... But there was her own flesh and blood crying for her—perhaps. So she descended on the old, familiar interior—familiar and distasteful—and resumed with zeal the rôle of mother.

Her presence was awkward, anomalous. The servants were disconcerted, and scarcely knew how to take her fluttery yet imperious orders. For Raymond himself, as any one could see, it was all purgatory—or worse. Every room had its peculiar and disagreeable memories. There was the chamber-threshold over which they had discussed her tendency to out-mode the mode and to push every extreme of fashion to an extreme still more daring—for that black gown with spangles, or whatever, had been but the first of a long, flagrant line. There was the particular spot in the front hall, before that monumental, old-fashioned, black-walnut "hat-rack," where he had cautioned more care in her attitude toward young bachelors, if only in consideration of his own dignity, his "face." There was the dining-room—yes, she stayed to meals, of course, and to many of them!—where (in the temporary absence of service) he had criticized more than once the details of her housekeeping and of her menu—had told her just how he "wanted things" and how he meant to have them. And in each case she had pouted, or scoffed, and had contrived somehow to circumvent him, to thwart him, and to get with well-cloaked, or with uncloaked, insistence her own way. Heavenly recollections! He felt, too, from her various glances and shrugs, that the house was more of a horror to her than ever, and, above all, that abominable orchestrion more hugely preposterous.

Albert kept mostly to his room. It was the same room which Raymond himself had occupied as a boy. It had the same view of that window above the stable at which Johnny McComas had sorted his insects and arranged his stamps. The stable was now, of course, a garage; but the time was on the way when both car and chauffeur would be dispensed with. Parallel wires still stretched between house and garage, as an evidence of Raymond's endeavor to fill in the remnant of Albert's previous vacation with some entertaining novelty that might help wipe out his recollection of the month lately spent with his mother. Albert was modern enough to prefer wireless—just then coming in—to "bugs" and postage-stamps; but the time remaining had been short. Besides, Albert liked the theatre better; and Raymond, during those last weeks in August, had sat through many woeful and stifling performances of vaudeville that he might regain and keep his hold on his son. His presence at these functions was observed and was commented upon by several persons who were aware of the aid he was giving for a bettered stage.

"Fate's irony!" he himself would sometimes say inwardly, with a sidelong glance at Albert, preoccupied with knockabouts or trained dogs.

Albert spent some of his daylight hours in bed; some in moving about the room spiritlessly. He looked out with lack-lustre eyes at the sagging wires, and seemed to be wondering how they could ever have interested him. His mother, as soon as she saw him, put him at death's door—at least she saw him headed straight for that dark portal. She began to insist, after a few days, that he go home with her: he would be hers, by right, within a fortnight, anyhow. Her new house, she declared, would be an immensely better place for him, and would immensely help him to get well, if—with a half-sob—he ever was to get well.

She knew, of course, the early legend of Johnny McComas, and had no wish to linger in its locale.

"You do want to go with your own, own mother—don't you, dear?"

"Yes," replied Albert faintly.

The town-house of Johnny McComas, bought at an open-eyed bargain and on a purely commercial basis, had some time since fulfilled its predestined function. It had been taken over, at a very good price, by an automobile company; the purchasers had begun to tear it down before the last load of furniture was fairly out, and had quickly run up a big block in russet brick and plate glass. Gertrude McComas had had no desire to inherit memories of her predecessor; if she had not urged the promptest action her husband's plan might have given him a still more gratifying profit.

They had built their new house out on the North Shore. At one time the society of that quarter had seemed, however desirable to the McComases, somewhat inaccessible. But the second wife was more likely to help Johnny thitherward than the first. Besides, the participation of the new pair in the scheme of dramatic uplift—however slight, essentially—had made the promised land nearer and brighter. They might now transplant themselves to that desired field with a certainty of some few social relations secured in advance.