She was so engaged in comforting her mother that she scarcely grieved for her father. She took charge of everything—money, house, bills.
Mrs. Golden had been overwhelmed by a realization that, however slack and shallow Captain Golden had been, he had adored her and encouraged her in her gentility, her pawing at culture. With an emerging sincerity, Mrs. Golden mourned him, now, missed his gossipy presence—and at the same time she was alive to the distinction it added to her slim gracefulness to wear black and look wan. She sobbed on Una’s shoulder; she said that she was lonely; and Una sturdily comforted her and looked for work.
One of the most familiar human combinations in the world is that of unemployed daughter and widowed mother. A thousand times you have seen the jobless daughter devoting all of her curiosity, all of her youth, to a widowed mother of small pleasantries, a small income, and a shabby security. Thirty comes, and thirty-five. The daughter ages steadily. At forty she is as old as her unwithering mother. Sweet she is, and pathetically hopeful of being a pianist or a nurse; never quite reconciled to spinsterhood, though she often laughs about it; often, by her insistence that she is an “old maid,” she makes the thought of her barren age embarrassing to others. The mother is sweet, too, and “wants to keep in touch with her daughter’s interests,” only, her daughter has no interests. Had the daughter revolted at eighteen, had she stubbornly insisted that mother either accompany her to parties or be content to stay alone, had she acquired “interests,” she might have meant something in the new generation; but the time for revolt passes, however much the daughter may long to seem young among younger women. The mother is usually unconscious of her selfishness; she would be unspeakably horrified if some brutal soul told her that she was a vampire. Chance, chance and waste, rule them both, and the world passes by while the mother has her games of cards with daughter, and deems herself unselfish because now and then she lets daughter join a party (only to hasten back to mother), and even “wonders why daughter doesn’t take an interest in girls her own age.” That ugly couple on the porch of the apple-sauce and wash-pitcher boarding-house—the mother a mute, dwarfish punchinello, and the daughter a drab woman of forty with a mole, a wart, a silence. That charming mother of white hair and real lace with the well-groomed daughter. That comfortable mother at home and daughter in an office, but with no suitors, no ambition beyond the one at home. They are all examples of the mother-and-daughter phenomenon, that most touching, most destructive example of selfless unselfishness, which robs all the generations to come, because mother has never been trained to endure the long, long thoughts of solitude; because she sees nothing by herself, and within herself hears no diverting voice....
There were many such mothers and daughters in Panama. If they were wealthy, daughter collected rents and saw lawyers and belonged to a club and tried to keep youthful at parties. If middle-class, daughter taught school, almost invariably. If poor, mother did the washing and daughter collected it. So it was marked down for Una that she should be a teacher.
Not that she wanted to be a teacher! After graduating from high school, she had spent two miserable terms of teaching in the small white district school, four miles out on the Bethlehem Road. She hated the drive out and back, the airless room and the foul outbuildings, the shy, stupid, staring children, the jolly little arithmetical problems about wall-paper, piles of lumber, the amount of time that notoriously inefficient workmen will take to do “a certain piece of work.” Una was honest enough to know that she was not an honest teacher, that she neither loved masses of other people’s children nor had any ideals of developing the new generation. But she had to make money. Of course she would teach!
When she talked over affairs with her tearful mother, Mrs. Golden always ended by suggesting, “I wonder if perhaps you couldn’t go back to school-teaching again. Everybody said you were so successful. And maybe I could get some needlework to do. I do want to help so much.”
Mrs. Golden did, apparently, really want to help. But she never suggested anything besides teaching, and she went on recklessly investing in the nicest mourning. Meantime Una tried to find other work in Panama.
Seen from a balloon, Panama is merely a mole on the long hill-slopes. But to Una its few straggly streets were a whole cosmos. She knew somebody in every single house. She knew just where the succotash, the cake-boxes, the clothes-lines, were kept in each of the grocery-stores, and on market Saturdays she could wait on herself. She summed up the whole town and its possibilities; and she wondered what opportunities the world out beyond Panama had for her. She recalled two trips to Philadelphia and one to Harrisburg. She made out a list of openings with such methodical exactness as she devoted to keeping the dwindling lodge insurance from disappearing altogether. Hers was no poetic outreach like that of the young genius who wants to be off for Bohemia. It was a question of earning money in the least tedious way. Una was facing the feminist problem, without knowing what the word “feminist” meant.
This was her list of fair fields of fruitful labor:
She could—and probably would—teach in some hen-coop of pedagogy.