Читать книгу Mother Mason - Bess Streeter Aldrich - Страница 4

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Mother sat in front of her Circassian walnut dressing table, her f--, no, plump form enveloped in a lavender and green, chrysanthemum-covered, stork-bordered kimono, and surveyed herself in the glass.

Mother was Mrs. Henry Y. Mason, and in Springtown, Nebraska, when one says "Henry Y." it conveys, proportionately, the same significance that it carries when the rest of the world says "John D."

It was eleven o'clock at night, which is late for Springtown. Mother had set her bread before climbing, rather pantingly, the wide mahogany stairs. There is something symbolical in that statement, illustrative of Mother's life. She had been promoted to a mahogany stairway, but she had clung to her own bread making.

Three diamond rings just removed from Mother's plump hand lay on the Cluny-edged cover of the dressing table. These represented epochs in the family life. The modest little diamond stood for the day that Henry left bookkeeping behind and became assistant cashier. The middle-sized diamond belonged to his cashier days. The big, bold diamond was Henry Y. as president of the First National Bank of Springtown.

Mother was tired and nervous to-night. She felt irritable, old, and grieved--all of which was utterly foreign to her usual sunny disposition.

She took off the glasses that covered her blue eyes. It was just her luck, she thought crossly, that she couldn't even wear eyeglasses. They simply would not stay on her nose. Deprecatingly she wrinkled that fat, broad member. Then she removed and laid on the table a thick, grayish braid of silky hair that had formed her very good-looking coiffure, and let down a limited, not to say scant, amount of locks that were fastened on as Nature--then evidently in parsimonious mood--had intended.

With apparent disgust she leaned forward under the lights that glowed rosily from their Dresden holders and scanned the features which looked back at her from the clear, oh, very clear, beveled glass. She might have seen that her skin was as fair and soft and pink as a girl's, that her mouth and eyes showed deep-seated humor, that her face radiated character. But in her unusual mood of introspection she could find nothing but flaws. The eyes looked weak and nearsighted without their glasses. The chin--like a two-part story, that chin gave every evidence of stopping, and then to one's surprise went merrily on. She leaned closer to the glass.

"Well," Mother said dryly, reaching for manicure scissors, "that is the limit!" Living with a houseful of young people as she did, Mother's English had in no way been neglected.

Then, as though to let Fate do its worst, and looking cautiously around--for she was very sensitive about it--Mother took from her mouth a lower plate of artificial teeth. Immediately, out of obedience to nature's law that there shall be no vacuum, her soft lower lip rushed in to fill the void.

"Pretty creature, am I not?" she grumbled.

Just at this point, we opine, every one will say, "Ah! No doubt the president of the First National Bank is showing symptoms of being attracted elsewhere!" Not so. Mother had only to turn her plump self around to see the long figure of that highly efficient financier stretched out in its black-and-white-checked tennis-flannel nightgown, sleeping the sleep of the model citizen and father.

No, Mother had only reached one of those occasional signboards in life that say "Fagged! Relax! Let up! Nothing doing!" She was suffering from a slight attack of mental and spiritual ennui, which is a polite way of saying that her digestion was getting sluggish. She was fifty-two, not exactly senile, but certainly not as gay as, say, twenty-two.

Just then the connoisseur of mortgages rolled over heavily like a sleepy porpoise and muttered something that sounded like "Ain oo cum bed?"

Fifty-two! she went on thinking, and she had never had a day to herself to do just as she liked. From that day, twenty-five years ago, when the nurse laid the red and colicky Bob in her arms, her time had belonged to others. In memory she could see Henry's white, drawn face as he knelt by her bed and said:

"Molly, you'll never, never have to go through this again."

But she had! Oh land, yes! Bob was twenty-five, Katherine was twenty-two, Marcia twenty-one, Eleanor sixteen, and Junior eleven--all healthy, good-looking, fun-loving, and thoughtless. She had been a slave to them, of course. She ought to know it by this time, every one had told her so.

But it wasn't just the family. There was the church--and the club--and the Library Board. Oh, she was hemmed in on all sides! Always, every one thought, Mrs. Mason would do this and that and the other thing. Why did people think she could attend to so many duties? She was just an easy mark! This week, for instance: this was Monday night; to-morrow afternoon she was to lead the missionary meeting; to-morrow night the Marstons were coming to play Somerset. They came every Tuesday night. She and John Marston would bid wildly against Sarah Marston's and Henry's slower playing, and Henry and Sarah would probably win. Henry's bidding was like his banking--calm, studied, conservative. Then she would serve sandwiches and fruit salad and coffee. Why did she rack her brain to think of dainty new things to feed them every Tuesday night, just to hear them say, "Lordy, Molly, your things melt in the mouth!"

Wednesday, the Woman's Club was to meet with her, and besides entertaining she had to get her paper into better shape to read. It had been Mrs. Hayes's date, but she couldn't have them--or didn't want them--and of course they had asked to come to Mrs. Mason's. Well, being an easy mark, she could put all the chairs away afterward and pick up the ballots strewn around.

Wednesday night was the church supper. Why had she baked the beans and made the coffee for years? Thursday afternoon the Library Board must meet, and Thursday night Junior's Sunday school class was to have a party in the basement of the church. She must go whether she felt like it or not, and help with the refreshments and play "Going to Jerusalem" until she was all out of breath and--oh, why did she have to keep on doing so many things for others? It was as though she had no personality. Never a day to herself to do just as she liked!

Tired and cross, she brushed her hair spitefully. Then her eyes fell upon a motto-calendar, silver framed, on the dresser. In gay red letters it flaunted itself:

. . . Know ye not

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

--Byron, "Childe Harold."

Could message be more personal? Underneath the calendar the detested lower plate of teeth reposed in a little Japanese dish which was their nightly bed. She picked them up and held them distastefully in her hand, so uncannily human, so blatantly artificial. And suddenly, born of rebellious mood and childish desire, was brought forth a plan.

She rose from her chair and undressed. Then she knelt by the side of the bed and said her prayer, a little rambling, vague complaint: "Oh, Lord; I'm so tired of the same things--and everybody expects so much of me--and there are so many things to do--and it won't be just a lie--if You know all about it--and why I did it--Amen."

And maybe, to the Good One who heard her, she seemed only a very fat little girl with a thin little pigtail hanging down her back.

Mother rose stiffly from her knees, snapped out the lights, and lay down beside the president of the First National Bank, who mumbled drowsily, "Hut time ist?"

At the breakfast table, Mother casually announced, as though she were accustomed to these gay little jaunts, that she was taking the nine-twenty train for Capitol City. It was like a hand grenade in their midst.

"You, Mother?" . . . "Why" . . . "What for?" . . . "You can't! It's Missionary Day!" came the shrapnel return.

"She's going to see Doctor Reeve about her plate." Father had been previously informed, it seemed.

"Her plate?" . . . "What plate?" . . . "Card plate?" . . . "Haviland plate?" . . . "Home plate?" Every one giggled. The Great American Family thoroughly appreciates its own wit.

"Sh!" Marcia tapped her own pretty mouth.

"The hours I've spent with Doctor Reeve Are but a china set to me-- I count them over, every one apart, My crockery! My crockery!"

They all laughed hilariously, all but Mother. They were not cruel, not even impertinent. But they were intensely fun-loving, a trait inherited from Mother herself. Strangely enough, humor, Mother's faithful partner for fifty-two years, had suddenly turned tail and fled, leaving only its lifeless mask which she surveyed in tragic dignity. Very well, let them make fun of her if they so wished.

There was some discussion as to which one should take Mother to the train. She settled it herself; there was a reason why she chose to walk. On analysis, she would have discovered that this reason was not to interrupt the new sensation of feeling sorry for herself.

She would have liked to make the trip to the station in mournful solitude, but Henry must have been watching for her, for he grabbed his hat and came running down the bank steps as she passed.

"Have you got plenty of blank checks?" he wanted to know.

All the way down Main Street Henry chatted sociably. When the train whistled in he said, "Well, Mother, we'll meet you to-night on the five-fifty"--and kissed her. In ordinary times a tender kiss from any member of her family had the effect of melting Mother into a substance resembling putty; but to-day she had no more feeling for her tribe than the cement platform on which she stood.

As she settled herself in the car, Henry came to the window and said something. The train was starting and she couldn't hear. So he shouted it: "You sure you got plenty of blank checks?"

"Yes, yes!"

She nodded irritably as though he had said something insulting.

At Capitol City Mother went immediately to the Delevan--rather timidly, to be sure, for Father had always been with her when they registered.

"Single rooms, three, four and five dollars," said the jaunty clerk.

"Five dollars," said Mother boldly, as befitted the wife of Henry Y. Mason.

There was a little time to shop before lunch, so she walked over to Sterling's and bought one nightgown, one kimono, and one pair of soft slippers. After lunch she sent a telegram to Henry:

Find lots to be done. Home Friday night.

Well, she had cut loose, burned her bridges! For three days she would escape that long list of energy-killing things. She would think of no one but herself, do nothing but what she wished to do.

In the afternoon she sauntered past the movie theaters, reading the billboards. To the hurrying passer-by she was only a heavily-built, motherly-looking person in a gray voile dress and small gray and black hat. In reality she was Freedom-from-Her-Mountain-Height.

In the theater, as she took nibbles from a box of candy and listened to the orchestra, if any thought of the missionary meeting with its lesson on "Our Work Among the Burmese Women" came to her, it was in pity for the feminine population of Burma who knew not the rapture of complete liberty.

She laughed delightedly and wept frankly over the joys and sorrows of the popular star, who whisked energetically through seven reels.

Out of the theater again, she loitered by the plate glass windows of the big stores, went in and out as fancy dictated, and bought a few things--always for herself.

When she returned to the Delevan there was a long-distance call for her. It was Henry: "This you, Mother? Say, I could just as well come down on the night train and stay with you until you're all through your work."

"Oh, no, no," she assured him. "I'm perfectly all right. I'm fine. I wouldn't think of it."

"You got plenty of blank checks?"

"Yes, yes!" Mother was smiling into the transmitter. Her grouch was as much a thing of the past as the battle of Gettysburg.

At dinner she ordered food for the first time in her life without running her finger up and down the price column. After resting a while in complete comfort, she sallied forth again. A famous tenor was singing at the Auditorium. His "Mother Machree" gave her a momentary twinge of conscience-itis, but she quickly recovered. Even the Mother Machree of the song may have had one wild fling some time in her life.

There were two more whole days of complete emancipation. Club afternoon, when she should have read her paper on "Pottery--Ancient and Modern," she was attending "The Vampire." She had always wondered just what that particular blood-sucking animal was like, and she was finding out.

When she left the theater it was sprinkling, and by dinner time there was a downpour. But after dining she went through the storm to a theater where a merry troupe demonstrated how one may effectively kick and sing at the same time. Now, Mother thought, as she watched the twinkling heels, the women were clearing up that awful mess of church-supper dishes and wondering how it happened they had fallen short of chicken and had three times as many noodles as they needed. Thank her stars, she had escaped it!

On Thursday she took a long street car ride, read comfortably in her room, went to two movies, and attended an art exhibit. The Library Board was meeting at home, of course, and listening half the afternoon to the Reverend Mr. Patterson tell how he started a library at Beaver Junction forty years ago. Then Junior's class was cavorting through those never-ending games of "Tin-Tin-Come-In" and "Beast-Bird-Fish-or-Fowl." Well, thank fortune, some other mother was getting a dose of assisting Miss Jenkins with her irrepressibles.

Friday morning Mother went up to Doctor Reeve's office. Friday afternoon she went home. On the train she reviewed her pleasurable three days. She had solved the problem. Life need never again become too strenuous. How simple it all was. The foolish part was that she had never thought of the plan before. She had only to slip away in peace and solitude whenever a week piled up with duties as the past one had. Good sense told her that she would not do it often, but it would always lie there before her--the way of beatific escape.

The train was rumbling through the cut in the Bluffs now, where lay the ghosts of many dead picnics, rounding the curve toward the water tank, slowing at the familiar station. There they were, Henry and Marcia and Eleanor--assembled as if they were about to greet the President of the United States. Junior, hanging by one arm and leg from a telephone pole, was waving his cap like a friendly orang-outang.

They kissed her rapturously--the girls and Junior. Henry's kiss, while resembling less a combustion, was frankly tender.

"Your dental work hurt you, Mother?"

"Oh, not a great deal." She was cheerfully brave.

They hung about her, all talking at once as they moved in a tight little bunch toward the car.

"Kathie's got two girls home from the University for over Sunday," they were telling her. "We had Tillie bake a cake and make mayonnaise and dress chickens for dinner tonight, but Papa wouldn't let her fry 'em--wants you to do it. And, Mamma, you've got to lead Missionary Meeting next Tuesday, Mrs. Fat Perkins said to tell you. They didn't have it last Tuesday."

"And to-night's paper said in the club notes that Mrs. Mason would read her paper on dishes, or kettles, or something like that next Wednesday."

"Oh, Muz!" It was Junior jumping backward in front of them and shouting. "We didn't have our party--Miss Jenkins said you'd be back to help next Thursday. Ain't that dandy?"

"They put off the library meeting till you got home, too."

"Did they?" A tidal wave of chuckles was forming somewhere in Mother's stout interior. "Did they by any possible chance have the church supper?"

"No, they never," they were all answering. "It was so rainy, and they 'phoned around, and they said anyway you weren't here to do the beans and coffee. It's next Wednesday."

"Oh, I guess you didn't miss much, Molly." Henry gave her substantial arm a friendly squeeze and beamed down at her. "The Marstons are coming to-night."

The tidal wave rolled in--or up. Mother was laughing hysterically. Humor, her faithful partner for fifty-two years, had returned from his mysterious vacation, and with the rest of the family had met Mother at the station.

Mother sat in front of her Circassian walnut dressing table. It was eleven o'clock. She had just come upstairs after setting the bread. She removed the heavy gray braid, laid it on the dresser and let down her scant hair. Then she took from her mouth the detested thing--so luridly red, so ghastly white--and surveyed it critically to see whether there remained a visible trace of the minute defect that Doctor Reeve's assistant in four minutes had ground down in his laboratory.

As she laid the plate in its Japanese dish, her eyes fell upon the silver-framed calendar. The old date was now ancient history. Mother removed the card and slipped the new page into place. In black and gilt it grinned impishly at her:

Freedom is only in the Land of Dreams.

Schiller.

Mother got into her nightgown and knelt by the bed to say her prayer. It was neither vague and wandering, nor was it a complaint. It was a concise little expression of gratitude, direct and sincere: "Dear Lord: I always felt that You must have a humorous side and now I am sure of it. The joke's on me. And, Lord, I'll be good and never be cross again about doing all the little everyday things for the folks about me. Amen."

Then she rose, snapped off the lights and lay down beside the president of the First National Bank, who mumbled sleepily, "Hut time ist?"