Good-bye, Son and Other Stories. Janet Lewis
she went out walking she carried her pocketbook, an extra wrap, and a brown paper parcel. Sometimes she had forgotten what was in the parcel, but she carried it because she would not have felt properly equipped without it. Once she had suffered from a disease of the skin, and her legs had been heavily bandaged. Over the bandages she wore a pair of white stockings, and over the white stockings a dark pair. After her skin was healed she was persuaded to give up the bandages, but she never gave up the white stockings. Frances was very fond of her aunt Roberta. They went walking together, and Roberta bought paper dolls, whole regiments by the sheet, and sticks of sweet paraffin gum, done up in colored wrappers with fringed ends. Sitting on the hassock by her aunt Roberta’s armchair, Frances cut out the regiments and arranged them in military fashion on the floor, and her aunt leaned over her, watching in admiration.
Roberta was the oldest of Mrs. Wilkey’s daughters. Her hair, once brown, had turned an even iron gray, become wiry and crisp. It looked frowzy, no matter how often it was combed. Her skin was brown, and her eyes shortsighted. She refused to wear glasses, and scowled, even when she smiled. One day Mary, entering by the front door, had found Frances and Roberta in the hall, weeping and clinging to each other. As far as she could find out from their answers, Kate had scolded Roberta for making Frances cry, Roberta had cried, and Frances had wept for Roberta. They were joined together against Kate, the old child and the young child comforting each other.
James Wilkey left no large oil portrait of himself to gaze down upon his grandchildren from the parlor wall. There were a few daguerreotypes in velvet cases in Mrs. Wilkey’s top bureau drawer, but the house itself was a more accurate portrait. The height of the doors, the largeness and uprightness of the furniture, the spaciousness of the rooms, seemed to indicate an erect, gray coated figure moving among them. Mrs. Wilkey’s plump short person passing with rapid step from dining room to living room, from living room to hall, oversaw these rooms for someone else. As she grew older she went about the house less and sat more in her large sunny bedroom on the second floor. Kate also kept to her own room a great deal, being a semi-invalid, a heavy, white-haired woman, lying in bed with a faded pink bed jacket about her shoulders. Kate’s children filled the house.
They were a gay lot. They never had enough money to dress as they would have liked to, but what money they had they spent on clothes, and were endlessly revising old clothes, to be a little more smart, a little more fresh. They left their scissors and tape measures on the parlor chairs, along with scraps of ribbons, basting threads, faded bunches of cloth flowers. They made their own hats, beginning sometimes fifteen minutes before the hour when they wanted to wear them. They had many beaux, but when beaux were short they commandeered their father, calling him Archie and tweaking his necktie. They would take off his gray felt hat and put it back on his head at a rakish angle, and kiss him behind the ears. They liked classy shows, but liked cheap shows better than no shows at all, and on a sultry summer afternoon they would take Archie by the arm and march him off to Forest Park, to the roller coasters and scenic railways. They would ride out in an open car, watching the dust and the torn papers fly up from the street at the rush of the wheels, and after the fun in the park was over they would cross the street to a cheap German restaurant, and have beer and cheese sandwiches with rye bread.
Archibald Martin had a way of getting jobs easily, but he had a way of losing them too. When he was working he contributed his share to the expenses of the house, and when he was out of work he didn’t. When he was out of work he spent most of his time at home, which pleased the girls and made things merrier. They said, “After all, Gran’s rich.” He made a few investments. Some of them were successful, but several times he was obliged to apply to his mother-in-law for help, when luck had been against him. Then he had a famous chance to make good money and pay back all he owed, if Gran would only lend him a little capital to start things off.
The old lady objected. Martin sat with hurt, surprised eyes, his fingers fidgeting with the ends of his sandy beard. He said, “You have always been so generous. I thought I could surely count on you, and it’s all for your good. In fact it’s mainly for the sake of paying back what I owe you. I don’t like to owe you money.”
Mrs. Wilkey said dryly, “I don’t object to your owing me money, Archibald, or to giving it to you either. In a way, all that I have given you has been yours, or would have been yours sooner or later. It’s simply that, if this goes on, there will presently be nothing at all to give you. I don’t know that it’s exactly fair to your daughters, either. You’re spending their inheritance.”
“But, Gran,” he said, “I am going to restore their inheritance.”
Mrs. Wilkey deliberately clipped the end of a thread from a sock she was mending. “Very well,” she said at length. “If the girls consent to your investing this money, I will let you have it, but I want it plainly understood that you are, all of you, receiving your share of the inheritance now.”
She began to hunt for a fresh needle in the red cotton tomato, and as she said nothing more, and did not look up from her search, Martin rose and went awkwardly and silently out of the room.
The girls were delighted at the prospect of rehabilitating the family fortunes, and Gran drew the check that Archibald required.
He bought a bunch of sweet peas for Gran on his way home from the city that night, and Gran was pleased with them. He bought them at the secondhand flower stand on the lower bridge of the elevated station, and they withered quickly, but that did not matter.
When Sue, Kate’s oldest daughter, divorced her husband, there had been nothing else to do but come home to the yellow house, bringing the two children, Leo and Sophia. Sue got herself a job in a firm of interior decorators and paid her share of the expenses of the house. Gran gave her the barn for an office and workshop, and she set up business for herself, moving her worktables into the carriage room and wheeling the antique surrey and barouche into the corner. It was too late to sell them. Nobody wanted a barouche. Nobody wanted a low green cutter with pictures painted on its sides. Will, the divorced husband, came regularly to see her, preferring to bring the monthly check in person. “Alimony night,” Sue would call, running upstairs. “I must get into my chauncy earrings.” Will had been divorced for drinking, and he lived in hopes of conquering himself and being reinstated in his family, but Sue liked him better as a lover than as a husband. He was a slender dark-eyed man with a silky black mustache. He drew marvelous pictures for the children and always had a pocketful of finely pointed pencils.
“Come now,” Mary heard Sophia saying to Frances, “my father’s here, and your father’s coming over, and you’re going to stay for supper. Come and tell Annie and hear her say, ‘With the help of God and a couple of policemen.’” Mary stood in the hall, holding the telephone, waiting for her husband to answer. Presently she heard the children in the kitchen.
“Can you get supper for four extra tonight?” said Sophia, and Annie answered, “With the help of God and a couple of policemen I can. Get out of here now, the two of you.”
The children tiptoed past her, very pleased, and went into the parlor to beg for pictures.
It was the middle of February, a week before Gran’s eightieth birthday. The house was sheeted in a sticky, sleety rain, and the afternoon was dark. In Sue’s room Sophia, Frances, and Roberta were making paper roses by gaslight. Sue looked in occasionally to see how things were going and issue directions. Marianne Martin came in once or twice but did not stay. She was spending the afternoon with Mrs. Wilkey to keep the old lady busy.
Frances and Sophia were curling the edges of petals on a hatpin. They stretched the centers a little with their thumbs, making them hollowed and flowerlike, and dropped them into a box. Sometimes Frances shook the box and raked the pink shells about lightly with the tips of her fingers, thinking of her aunt Roberta’s rose jar. She liked the paper petals as well as the real ones. By and by Cousin Sue and Cousin Marianne would build them up into flowers, fastening them to a stem, binding the stem with green and attaching green leaves. There were already big boxes of flowers in the closet and under the bed. Her aunt Roberta was cutting out petals from a pattern, breathing heavily as she worked and stopping often to watch the little girls. The house was full of conspiracy. When it came time for Frances to go home to supper, Cousin Sue brushed her off with a