Nathan’s first quarrel of note with Milly resulted from the appropriation of the married sister’s home by the Richards tribe as an extension of their own. My friend made the additional discovery common to many men who have wedded Sex instead of Ladyhood, that he had also married the girl’s family. As soon as Milly had sorted out her Woolworth dishes and run up a thirty-dollar bill at the Red Front Grocery, she affected to demonstrate her housewifery by inviting all of that family to dinner,—Sunday dinner. And her family came. Great was the coming thereof.
Nathan held a dim idea there had been various brothers and sisters in the Richards house across the “flats.” But that first Sunday dinner was a revelation—likewise the alarming quantities of food it required to satiate them. The Forge larder reasonably resembled “a land overflowing with milk and honey” before they came. After they had gone, that thirty-dollar commissary had been attacked as by a plague of Egyptian locusts. Nathan, however, had not begrudged the food. What bothered him most was their methods of assimilation. There had been little or no table etiquette at Johnathan’s house. But such as it had been, it was courtly beside the demonstration in “manners”, or lack of them, revealed at that first Sunday dinner as well as in many hectic repetitions.
When the Richards tribe recovered from their awe of Nathan, discovered him quite a mortal being with two arms, two legs and a propensity to consume food at conventional intervals like themselves, they “pitched in.” The younger children squalled and fought over smaller delicacies. Two of them enjoyed a pleasing altercation with pieces of baked potato. Mother Richards held the baby against a moist breast and allowed the little barbarian to pull a plate of soft squash pie into her lap. This was lamentable but cute. Undoubtedly Nathan had pulled a plate of soft squash pie into his mother’s lap at “thirteen months.”
Nathan took issuance with old Jake one Sunday, however, for producing a flat, brown hip-flask and using copious draughts therefrom to “give him an appetite.” Thereafter old Jake “made his vittles set right” with more. The lad, sick of the whole Richards tribe, at the frayed end of his patience generally, advised old Jake in hot phrases to work up his appetites and make his vittles set right with alcohol elsewhere,—never to repeat the disgusting performance in his home again. A dour time followed. Old Jake had imbibed enough to be quarrelsome. Milly took her father’s part. She called Nathan a hypocrite because “he couldn’t stand the sight of a little hooch.” It was her house as well as Nathan’s and if Nathan didn’t like it, she guessed she knew what he could do. Which Nathan did. He grabbed old Jake by turkey neck and trouser seat and threw him out into the mud. Old Jake’s flask and hat followed. So did the Richards tribe, though they went voluntarily and sidestepped the mud. They swore they had been insulted; they would never set foot in Nathan’s house again. But a month later they were back; old Jake had apologized, he had said “blood was thicker than water” and it didn’t pay to hold grudges. And they descended on the large assortment of table delicacies purchased the previous evening at the Élite Bakery and ate until the boy wondered if sheer hunger hadn’t driven them back. He thought they must conserve their appetites during the week to distend their stomachs on Sunday noon at his expense.
The same superficial logicians who would acclaim Nat a weakling for not leaving his father to learn his lesson at the box-shop would undoubtedly have the boy kick his way out of the domestic slough in which he had slipped now, get divorced and make a fresh start elsewhere. Very good indeed for those able to see the situation in perspective or whose enlightenment permits them so to decide the matter for their own gratification. Nathan could not see the situation in any perspective; he had little training and less enlightenment to help him decide any matter; he only knew that in his heart was a blind, piteous groping for something higher and better, knew instinctively that this sort of thing was not for him and that he had blundered, blundered horribly. But how to correct that blunder was quite another question.
There was a baby coming!
The lad couldn’t bring himself to cast aside or leave a woman “in Milly’s condition” as Mother Richards sighed over it. One narrow mistake, made far back the day Mrs. Forge had whirled on her small son and scared him so badly anent sex, had been followed by another and another. As he grew older, blunder after blunder had rolled up, like a ball of soft snow juggernauting down hill. Now he was about to become a father, temperamentally a pathetic mixture of half man, half boy himself. No, he could see no self-justification in separating from Milly. Not then. And things went from bad to worse.
The baby was born and any neatness and housewifery which Milly may have shown before its arrival were quickly dispensed with, “caring for baby.” Milly apparently spent whole days and weeks “caring for baby.” Her floors went unswept and her dishes went unwashed. Nathan subsisted on various sticky pastries procured from the Élite Bakery. With increasing frequence he was advised frankly to “go up town and get his supper” because “care of baby” had so preoccupied the shining hours that Milly hadn’t even had time to do up her hair. Which was self-evident. If she “did up her hair” twice a week, she performed the extraordinary. She “twisted it up for comfort” in the morning and it was still twisted up for comfort when she retired at night. And Milly was always overworked, frightfully overworked. She said so. Nathan had to listen. All this, while Johnathan was doing his utmost at the factory to show his son that he was wrong in everything on general principle and all the trouble between father and son was Nat’s conceit, incorrigibility and inherent animosity against “retrenchment.”
Nathan had heard somewhere about the queer, constricted twinge which comes to a father who feels the tiny fingers of his first-born grip his own. Nathan felt no such twinge. The baby was born at the Richards’ home across the “flats.” Nathan had wished his wife to go to the local hospital but Milly was shy of hospitals. She called them “butcher shops.” Nathan ate his meals at the Élite the week preceding the great event and slept in an unmade bed in a slovenly house. Then one mid-afternoon young Tom burst into the box-shop office. Excitedly he accosted Nathan.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Yer kid’s come! An’ I lost my bet with Mickey Sweeney. I said it was gonna be a boy and the darn thing’s cost me thirty cents!”