Читать книгу America Moved - Booth Tarkington - Страница 7

Counting by realistic time, astronomical time, I was born a very short while ago—less than a few minutes ago—and yet my mother’s father, Beebe Booth, who lived until I was a grown man, did some soldiering in the War of 1812. In his infancy, if he’d happened to be in France instead of Connecticut, he could have seen Marie Antoinette and Robespierre; and when Wellington died both of my grandfathers were past middle age. When I was born,1 in a small but active Indianapolis, there was no German Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew was Emperor of the French, Queen Victoria had more than thirty years to reign over Britain, there weren’t any telephones or electric lights in the world; and our Union’s supreme war hero, General Grant, was President of the United States.

This is the long and the short of it; but just after my birth I was so busy getting used to having a body that for a while I wasn’t aware of even General Grant. I didn’t at once perceive that I’d come among beings of my own kind; I saw people as assistants only; though later, when I was a full year old, I took their principal function to be that of applause.

I’m explaining that at the age of one year I was a celebrity and regarded myself as such. Babies are like anybody else; they accept the wildest and most ill-founded adulation as deserved tribute; naturally, their self-conceit is egregious. Their minds are already busy and, though they can’t use distinct words as symbols of their thoughts, they draw conclusions. Long before they can add two to two they can put two and two together.

First Words

I was seldom approached without a kind of servility and professions of utter admiration. For almost half of my life I’d been entreated daily, and sometimes hourly, to enchant audiences with repetitions of the vocal performances that had made me famous. The outcries evoked by my talent were so inevitable that sometimes, bored, I declined to give a show. One year old, I knew as well as did the boastfulest of my kinsfolk that I was the star of the age because I’d begun to talk when I was only seven months old.

I knew the whole of this triumph, especially how I’d scored on two competitors—Marjorie Harrison, next door, who was a month older than I, and Victor Hendricks, up at the next corner, almost precisely my own age. It was thought singularly creditable that my first comprehended utterance wasn’t “Mamma” or “Papa” but “Hyuh, Jock!” Out of a clear sky I had called the dog. By the time I was a year old I was almost sated with the story: how my father, within the hour of my startling first performance—probably within the half hour—had gone next door to tell Marjorie Harrison’s parents all about it and how Mr. Harrison had angrily denied its plausibility; how he had been brought to me and the dog let in, and how I had not failed in this crisis, but had distinctly said “Hyuh, Jock!”—twice—in Mr. Harrison’s presence; and how he had then stalked out of the house without a single word, returning in fury to his extinguished Marjorie.

Having thus begun, at seven months, by calling the dog, I talked on, never saying a thing that wasn’t quotable. Behind the Infant Prodigy there still remain in memory—for background of my second year—a few faint pictures like pale old water colors: that pleasant bit of Meridian Street—sunshine on green lawns—our ample brick house and its brick stable in the shade of trees illimitably high; two lovely big ladies dancing about me in ballooning white dresses and indistinguishable from adults, though they were my sister Hautie and a friend of hers, both twelve years old.

How far back into childhood can we remember? I remember the first snow of my second winter, when probably I hadn’t reached the age of eighteen months; I remember how that snow disappointed me. I know it was the first snow of the winter because I’d been looking forward to it.

There’s much argument about rememberings. One of the younger members of a family claims to recall something; the others tell him he couldn’t; they say he only thinks he does because he’s heard it described by his elders, and of course it’s true that we not seldom find it difficult to discriminate between what we ourselves recollect and what’s been put into our minds by frequent hearsay. Nevertheless, having been born at the end of July, 1869, I remember the first snow of the winter of 1870–1871. If that snow fell in December of 1870 I was between sixteen and seventeen months old.

A novelist must make the exercising of his memory—as well as other self-searchings—a constant practice, or he will not understand and make real the creatures he puts into his books; but if other people did the inward delving that he professionally does, they would no doubt turn up as much from their own obscured infancies. My earliest recollection isn’t here recorded as a feat; it leads to a suggestion.

A Very Young Man Goes West

When, at probably less then eighteen months, I looked out of a window at the first snowflakes of that year, I was disappointed because of their smallness. I was disappointed because I then remembered snowflakes that had been as large as the palm of my hand, and these now weren’t half that size. Thus, though I don’t remember the larger snowflakes that fell when I was less than a year old, I remember that when I was less than eighteen months old I did remember them, and that at less than a year old I had observed their size as compared to the size of the palm of my then hand.

I didn’t tell anybody about this, hence nobody told me about it later; I remember it. The suggestion is that the youngest baby has more than what are called “prenatal memories”; that he’s not only thinking, he’s already recollecting, and that conscious memory is an activity within us at birth.

Two years old, I was complacently aware that I owed some of my importance to the achievements of another person, for whom I’d been named. Our family possessed, besides worthy ancestors, a living Great Man; and, like all other families that have this privilege, we borrowed greatness from our hero. He was my mother’s brother, Newton Booth. Physically delicate, just out of college, and beginning the practice of law in that agreeable town, Terre Haute, he’d suddenly swung his placid young life to Western roads of adventurous and sometimes tragic hardship. Now—generous, rich, still young, and still a bachelor—he’d become the governor of California. My mother and my sister and I went to spend a year with him in Sacramento.2

Uncle Newton made much of me; so did the circle of gay early Californians surrounding him. Toys almost glutted me; I heard tales loudly told of me, saw groups of expectant faces about me awaiting the delights of my wisdom; and bearded men, as well as hourglass-shaped ladies, professed themselves ravished by photographs of me in kilts and velvet jacket. The flatteries I received might easily have convinced me that I was a philosopher, or a wit, or a great beauty. They did. I thought I was all three.

Much was made, too, of some imagined companions of mine, a family I’d found in the air. Where I got the name of these ghostly people, the “Hunchbergs,” and the name of their dog, “Simpledoria,” nobody knew, nor did I; but Mr. and Mrs. Hunchberg, and their son and daughter, almost grown up, and Simpledoria, appear to have had reality for me. I talked with them at great length, when actual people were present as well as when I was alone. I quoted the Hunchbergs incessantly, played with Simpledoria on the carpet, spoke to him from my bed at night. Uncle Newton gave a dinner for the Hunchbergs, with chairs placed for the four of them and a plate on the floor for Simpledoria. Through me, the translator as it were, my uncle talked seriously with Mr. Hunchberg, had cigars passed to him and was regretful that he didn’t smoke. To my three-year-old eyes those empty chairs weren’t vacant; I saw the dear Hunchbergs there, and my uncle understood because in his own childhood he’d had an unseen companion—a boy braver and more dashing than himself and known to him as “Bill Hammersly.”3

The Way of a Transgressor

In that whole year in the golden land, my happiness was as unclouded as my self-esteem—except for two slight setbacks. These were caused by social errors on my part that evanescently dimmed me; and both are now known to me mostly through hearsay, though memory brings flickerings. The first of the two episodes reflects even less credit upon my innate character than does the second—which was, morally speaking, disgraceful—for the first seems to show that I deliberately tried to be funny. Humor isn’t accomplished in that way.

A lady, a stranger to me, was making an admiring to-do over me; and we two were the center of a group after lunch at my uncle’s. Conspicuous to me were her nose and a beautiful gold tassel at the end of a chain about her neck. In response to her courtesies, I asked, “What do you wear that pretty gold tassel for? To dust your big ugly nose with?”

Out of a startled hush my uncle for the first time spoke to me sharply. He said, dumfoundingly, “Tut! Tut!”

In a panic, I spoke hastily, “I mean, do you wear that tassel to dust your little pretty nose with?”

I was hustled away, crestfallen; but later in the day my vanity was again inflated. What I’d said to the lady I overheard repeated by several people—and not as a reproach to me. From all I could learn I had behaved excellently.

The second instance, somewhat grotesque, sheds out of the long ago a faint light upon the California of that period. Uncle Newton gave a great dinner for gentlemen important in the affairs of the state, and probably few tables in the country could have been surrounded by owners of more picturesque pasts; most of the banqueters, like my uncle, must have been men of the early gold rush.4 It had been arranged that the governor’s nephew and namesake should be presented to them, and, in evening clothes—white dress and blue satin sash—I was brought in, toasted noisily, and urged to remain.

Accustomed to tributes, I was anything but embarrassed, and readily occupied a chair—or the top of a dictionary upon a chair—among flushed new friends. Far away at the other end of the beflowered long table, my uncle didn’t observe what happened to me. Someone offered me a glass of champagne. I drank it, and seemed to perceive that in affording me this pleasure life was promising to consist entirely of exaltation. In fact, it’s all too significant that even so early I took to champagne, asked for more, got it, and became uninterruptedly talkative.5 The hardy forty-niners about me made merry; I may be said to have been plied with wine, and it was afterward hushedly related that I astonished the pliers by a precocious talent for absorption. Thus, in one particular line of accomplishment, I am now probably without a living colleague. I doubt that any other inhabitant of the year 1941 has the right, so to put it, of recording that he got howling drunk in the state of California in 1872.

There comes to me faintly, faintly a picture of results: wholly unexpected dreadful illness, expressions of indignant solicitude uttered by those who put me to bed. I suffered; and yet—and yet, as days passed, there stole into me from without—perhaps from heard whisperings—more than a suspicion that again I had done something remarkable; that once more, in a manner of speaking, I had distinguished myself.

The gilded year in California ended; my mother and my sister and I came back to my father and to Indianapolis—and to something near penury. Calamity was upon the country, for that was the first year of a great depression. The word “depression” wasn’t used; everyone talked of the “panic,” and the period became, historically, the Panic of ’73.

We didn’t return to our fine brick house on Meridian Street; it was lost to us—taken away by the panic. My father, whose commencement address at college had made him secretary to the governor of Indiana, was a “rising young lawyer,” when, unfortunately, he accepted a judgeship. Though for the rest of his long life his fellow citizens never spoke to him or of him except as Judge Tarkington, in our Hoosier way, the title was inadequate compensation for the clients he lost through his term on the bench. When he returned to the bar he’d begun to get some of them back; but the Panic of ’73 banished legal fees to the realm of illusion.

The Frown of Fortune

Suddenly we were poor, lived in a small wooden house; then moved to a side street, where we occupied only a lower floor, with another depleted lawyer and his family over our heads. We still owned our two loved horses, Gray and Fly—my father could never bear to sell a horse—but they were economically in the country, at pasture, and we were no longer carriage folk.

Present-day little children, born into this depression, the day of the New Deal, unemployment, and terrible wars, will have their memories of the bad period even if they live long enough to emerge into another Golden Age, as we did after the long pressure of the Panic of ’73. For these present-day children, too, there may come a time when the world again seems settled, responsible, and solid, when politicians and dictators will not be upsetting everything, threatening every hearthstone and every earned dollar; and when from that emergence into placidity—if it comes—they look back upon the pinched times of their childhood, I hope that their recollections may be as cheerful as are mine now of the days of the Great Panic.

Possibly I shouldn’t remember that disaster at all if we hadn’t lost our house and the sunny green yard where I’d played. No recollections of protests or wailings from my father, my plucky mother, and my sparklingly pretty fifteen-year-old sister recall it to me; their endurance of the change hadn’t a flinch, though the blows must have been heavy and many for all three of them. About me there seemed always the sound of laughter, and my father’s indomitable gaiety kept my world in place, made living in it an experience safely all of gusto and merriment.

An addition to my evening prayers, however, indicates that my mother had special hopes. After the customary conclusion, “I pray the Lord my soul to take,” I was instructed to append, and did: “Please bless papa and mamma and Hautie and Boothie, and make Uncle Newton senator and papa county clerk.” The governor’s term of office in California drew near its close, and the county clerkship, at home, was rewarded by fees that sometimes, I believe, approached thirty thousand dollars a year—probably about thirty times the income my father was then somehow wringing out of his legal practice.

It was at this period, when I was four and five and six, that my complacent view of myself began to be damaged. Explanation mayn’t be needed that the shocking vanity of children shocks nobody; mine was inside me and I have been told that I was regarded as a rather solemn little boy, quiet and given to ruminations. Nevertheless, my life, so far, had brought me no cause to look upon myself as imperfect in any detail. My conduct was sometimes directed, but never criticized, and I hadn’t yet begun to wonder what sort of person I was—or what sort of looking person I was. A complete content with myself and a subservient world prevailed—until I encountered the boy called Brick-top.

There was no lawn about the frame house where we lived in dusty New York Street—in summer all the streets not cobbled were mostly dust—but the sidewalk, close to the front door, was shady and became my playground. Children of the neighborhood joined me there, played with my toys, held converse with me, and thus I became acquainted with Brick-top, who was a head taller than I was and the son, as he often mentioned, of a professional fireman.

Whenever I had to wear my little light blue velvet breeches and Brick-top saw me in them, he would tell me again that his father was a fireman.

On a promising afternoon I had a dime and was on my way to the corner drugstore to buy candy. Aged five, I had no conception of any other sensible use of money; this infrequent dime brought heaven close, for my palate was what I most dearly cared about. I held it to be the high seat of pleasure, and was indifferent to objects with which it had already dealt and passed on to the alimentary canal. When such objects roused an enemy within me, so long as the urge of taste lasted I would go on eating—sometimes even moaning a little—what my stomach fought to tell me it could not include. Real money was high in 1874, commodities were low, and my shining dime foretold a longish debauch.

Low Finance

Outside the drugstore Brick-top stopped me and made inquiries. I opened my hand, showed the dime, and announced my purpose, naturally not adding any hospitable offer.

“I got a good deal more money than that,” Brick-top said; and took from his pocket a large copper two-cent piece and an even larger one-cent piece, coinage of that epoch. Beside them the small dime looked inconsequent. “This money o’ mine’s lots more money than that dime o’ yours,” said Brick-top.

“Is it?” I asked. “Would it buy more candy than my dime would, Brick-top?”

‘Lots more,” he told me, and frowned, seeming to ponder. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though,” he said. “I’ll trade you all this money for your dime. Mine’s more; but I like you and I’ll trade. All this money I got is too heavy to carry around. It kind of weighs me down.”

“It kind of weighs me down” were his long-remembered words precisely. I was not wholly senseless; I needed a real argument to persuade me to the exchange, and there it was. “It kind of weighs me down.” Brick-top didn’t want to get tired. I traded my dime for three cents, not without a troubled kind of gratitude.

Brick-top was not to be seen when I came out of the drugstore after a startling talk with a derisive clerk. I walked home laggingly, pausing often, and becoming on the way a slightly different sort of person.

An Enemy Raid

The psychologists tell us that these childish jolts affect our whole lives. Deeply puzzled as I returned from the enlightening drugstore, I had a vague realization, for the first time in my life, that a fellow being had made a fool of me. Dazingly it began to appear to me that some people did such things and that I wasn’t all-wise. This seems to have been my first self-doubt.

Brick-top, ere long, gave me another. I had the most magnificent hobby-horse in the world, a maned and tailed and caparisoned bright creature, the gift of Uncle Newton, and brought to me all the way from California. One day I left it on the sidewalk during the noon meal; and when I came back to it, to ride again, I was sickened. A horrible decapitation had taken place. My horse stood headless, with raw wood showing plaintively where the neck had joined the sculptured and painted shoulders.

“Brick-top did it!” said the little girl who had remained near by to inform me. “Brick-top threw a brickbat at it and knocked its head off and grabbed it and ran away with it!”

I stood and stood. I began to suspect that I was not universally loved—even that I could be disliked. My impression now is that although Brick-top’s father’s pay as a fireman probably exceeded what my father was making in his law office, Brick-top felt that he was right to despoil me and be my enemy, because I was a Little Rich Boy who sometimes wore blue velvet breeches.

Subsequently, Brick-top did other things to me. I don’t recall what they were, but one of them brought me another mystification about myself. All alone, I was whispering, and at intervals speaking aloud, my topic being the most recent of Brick-top’s inflictions upon me.

“What do you stand it for?” I asked. “What makes you let him treat you like that?”

“Well, I’m not going to much longer,” I responded. “Brick-top better look out! If you were me you wouldn’t let him act like that, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” I said. “But all you do’s talk. Why don’t you show him?”

“You make me sick!” I said truculently. “Didn’t you just hear me say I’m going to——”

I stopped muttering, having realized that I was almost quarreling with somebody. With whom?

I stood in wonder, becoming aware that it was a habit of mine to hold debate with this unknown; and there seemed to be, also, a third person present—somebody who listened coldly to both of us—but of him I could make nothing at all except that it was uncomfortable to think about him. The second person, my talkative opponent, tried to goad me into actions that I couldn’t take; yet at heart seemed really sympathetic. What puzzled me most was the way we said “You” to each other, since both of us must, after all, be me. I hadn’t solved the puzzle when, at about this time, I became—almost officially with some people—the Worst Boy in Town.

My mother’s piano had been salvaged from the financial wreck; evenings on New York Street were gay with the singing of the three older members of my family—ballads, songs old and new, melodies from The Bohemian Girl and the Verdi operas—and once a week a shattered friend of my mother’s taught a small dancing class of children in our parlor, with an assistant at the piano. The children were accompanied by their mothers, and one of these ladies had an emotional aversion to cats. Therefore, our cat, though lovable, was kept in a back room during the dancing hour, but one day an older boy secretly talked me into becoming a comedian. He convinced me that if I’d fetch the cat privately, approach little Eva Townley’s mother from behind as she sat watching the lesson, and drop pussy over her shoulder to alight upon her lap, Mrs. Townley’d be surprised and all would be joy and nice harmless merriment. I needn’t tell anybody that the idea was his; I could take all credit for it.

Expecting to delight the world, I tried for the credit and got it. More uproar, confusion, and fury can seldom have been so simply created; and it was I who had the real surprise. When Mrs. Townley stopped screaming her opinion of me, she ran from the house, dragging her daughter with her, nevermore to return; the dancing class dispersed, and I was placed in a sequestration lasting longer than pussy’s. Released from this first actual punishment, I had it made clear to me, verbally, that even my father couldn’t look upon me as a funny dog. Neither he nor my mother could bear to think of the reputation I’d made for myself.

They were right. For the following fifteen years Mrs. Townley never mentioned me, or heard anyone speak of me, without supplying her unvaried synonym for me; and reiteration so sincere carries weight. I had many an acquaintance who at times became temporarily known as the Worst Boy in Town; but they were only runners-up. I held the title longest.

Conviction of Sin

When I was six, my father had begun to get a little the better of the Panic of ’73. We moved into a commodious house in the new North Side, had a yard and big trees again, had a cook again, had a horse and vehicles. We rented this house, extravagantly, for fifty dollars a month, which was high for those days in Indianapolis; and now I didn’t play with street children. Beyond an iron fence, on the day of our installation, I saw two clean-faced, dressed-up children, a brother and sister near my own age. They looked at me; and immediately I began to display my New York Street accomplishments.

In New York Street were current various knowing phrases too shady to be used in the presence of grown people; I’d acquired them from Brick-top and others. Upon the clean little boy and his sister I tried one of these mots after another. I looked at them derisively and called out, “Wipe off your chins!”

I was sat upon, not admired; they took a moral tone with me. “That’s bad. You’re bad! You mustn’t say that.”

I went further. “Wipe off your chins and pull down your vests!”

The brother and sister, grave and instructive, said. “That’s bad. You musn’t say that. You’re bad!”

They invited me to come into their yard and play with them. I again tried to be clever in the New York Street manner. “I don’t haf to!” I said. “Doctor says it ain’t healthy!”

“That’s bad,” the brother and sister told me. “You mustn’t say that. You’re bad!”

Dispirited, I gave up the effort to impress them and just talked naturally.

“That’s bad. You’re bad,” they said, as before, and began to reform my vocabulary.

They became my playmates, but I never felt quite on a level with them—even when they were most genial they were still helpfully critical, always right and two to one. The little girl, six, one day informed me—in the manner of a notification—that I was her sweetheart, and I said, “Am I? Well—all right”; but neither she nor her brother, who was unblushingly present, seemed to feel that my new position placed me upon an equality with them—nor did I.

Of course I hadn’t thus precociously lost my high opinion of myself; but the mirrorlike surface of self-conceit was showing a few dents. I’d begun to find difficulties in proving myself as important as I felt. In all gatherings of my kind I of course strove incessantly to be the central figure. Desiring applause, I would squeal, bellow, try to sing, try to whistle, would leap, run, hop, and fling myself about, screeching, “Look at me! Look at me, everybody! Look at me—me—me!”

They wouldn’t. They, too, were screaming, “Look at me!” What they did seemed to me of no merit and uninteresting; and, when those who could stand on their heads did so, and I couldn’t, I squealed, “Look at me,” announced that I would turn somersaults, tried, and but flopped soggily upon the grass.

I was approaching defeat by something profound, years beyond my comprehension. Every one of these other children had been as brilliantly an infant prodigy in his own family as had I in mine. In one way or another, all of them had been applauded celebrities; hence every one of them now believed himself the beloved sole star of the age. This was hard on me, but good for the human species; we’re told that babies and little children, not made much of, thrive ill. A deep instinct in the race makes the fuss over little children that enlarges their vanity. Egoism, fertilized early from without, is one of humanity’s necessities; fertilized only from within, it can become as monstrous as Hitler.

When our country was just a hundred years old, the year of the great Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, I was seven, had a little “campaign uniform” with a lard-oil lamp fastened to my blue-and-white-oilcloth cap, and discovered that I was a Republican. The children of our neighborhood were all Republicans, loved Hayes and Wheeler, hated Tilden and Hendricks, and learned to squeal fiercely at known or suspected opponents:

“Stewed rats and dead cats

Are good enough for Democrats!”

I hadn’t yet been sent to school, and couldn’t write; but for a year or two I’d been able to read, though I’ve no recollection of learning this art. The only child in the house, and enticed by suggestive talk in the small family circle, I’d rather prematurely read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and The Old Curiosity Shop; and my first literary attempt was made at about this time. As I couldn’t write, my indulgent sister, chivalrously concealing her amusement, became my amanuensis. I dictated to her the opening of a story, and, though the manuscript disappeared, I remember that it concerned a full-grown young man who rode forth from a castle on a bright morning and would have had a startling adventure if I’d been able to construct one for him. I seem to have encountered the obstacle of complete vacuity after the first paragraph or two; nevertheless, I had great praise for this effort, as well as for the now modernistic drawings and water colors that I produced on rainy days.

A Place in the Sun

Moreover, without embarrassment or any other symptoms of modesty, I made a public appearance—no novelty to me, as I was already accustomed to confront seas—or at least ponds—of upturned faces. I must here offer the confession that I was a child declaimer. At the Christmas celebration of our Sunday school, when I was four, my father had lifted me to the platform, where I stood before the lighted tree and recited I know not what so loudly and rapidly that I was defined as sensational. Every now and then I was taken to recite somewhere, even to a reunion of Civil War soldiers to whom I shouted Barbara Frietchie in supposedly German dialect—heaven forgive me and my proud and loving parents!

I recited at home, before callers; even without callers I recited at home; there was never a family party when the loyalty of uncles, aunts, and cousins wasn’t strained by my gift. In my hearing no one called me a dreaded little show-off; people said, with a benignity I didn’t perceive to be the mask of pain, “It’s so nice he never needs to be urged.”

In 1876 there prevailed a patriotic effort at entertainment called, I think, Martha Washington’s Tea Party. Every city, town, and village contained an inhabitant who was believed, at least by himself, to look like George Washington—a little, anyhow. For Martha Washington’s Tea Party he got himself insecurely into what was called Revolutionary costume, but wasn’t; and he and a lady thought to resemble Martha walked out before audiences in the local theater, or Odd Fellows’ Hall, or perhaps in a tent on the lawn of the courthouse yard. Except Benedict Arnold, all the great Revolutionary personages, also in Revolutionary costume, had their names shouted, came in, and bowed to George and Martha. Then music sounded, George and Martha led a grand march, and the marchers performed a minuet. That was all. The audience was then supposed to go home, patriotic and satisfied that it had seen something.

In Indianapolis we had not only this spectacle enacted by grown people but also a children’s Martha Washington’s Tea Party, coached by my sister, not quite eighteen and just out of the convent school at Georgetown. In curly white wig, black velvet tailed coat, satin waistcoat, and little black velvet breeches—with lace frills at the knee in the fashion of Louis XIII—I was thought remarkable in the role of Aaron Burr. I thought so myself and so did the nearest of my relatives. After the performance the prettiest little girl in town, in Revolutionary costume, and I, as Aaron Burr, were taken by our mothers to the photographer’s—and after that I always listened attentively when our family album was brought forth and somebody’d say, “This is Boothie as Aaron Burr.”

I didn’t care much for the visitors when they just responded, “Is it?”

My superintended evening prayer had changed in a detail because that part of my earlier petition had met a favorable response from Above. The great California uncle had been elected to the United States Senate, and here and there over the country he was “spoken of for higher office.” I now said nightly, by my bedside, “Please bless papa and mamma and Hautie and Boothie, and make Uncle Newton President and papa county clerk.”

Our hero came from California, that summer of 1876, to make speeches up and down his native state of Indiana for Hayes and Wheeler, and there were grand nights when shouting and glittering long processions tramped down the street with bands blaring, and, through the flare and smoke of torches, we saw Uncle Newton exalted but tranquil as he was borne by in an open carriage on his way to stir the multitude. For all of his relatives he brought splendid presents as usual, and his gift to my mother was so magnificent that now she and my father saw their way to build a house, one that should surpass the lamented edifice in which I had been born.

Pride Before a Fall

The new house was a year in building, and to us the ponderous stone foundations seemed cathedral-like; we were sure that never would there rise a nobler house. Such a one today there could not be for a dozen times the cost. A foreman said to my father, “I’m getting a dollar a day and glad to grab it. Why, after the war and up to the panic, I used to make as high as five dollars a day sometimes and could afford to wear a silk hat! Do you think times are ever going to get any better?”

Times did get better. Thrift and endurance made them better. Men toiled at jobs they didn’t like, did anything until the day should come when they’d once more have the kind of work they desired. They worked for any pay they could get, lived on the little they made, and so won their way back to silk hats again. It wasn’t until the present depression had burdened us for a decade that I began to understand what, in less than half the time, “We the People” then accomplished unaided and undeterred by our agents, the Government in Washington. When our house was finished and my mother kept open house on New Year’s Day, the bright new rooms were crowded with jolly and optimistic people dressed in their newest best.

An orchestra played, gentlemen flourished skin-tight lemon-colored gloves; and ladies in close satin basques and long-trained skirts laughed and sang to the music. They were all coming out on top of the Panic of ’73.

I was in school now, a good little pupil near the top of my class and sometimes appointed—as an honor—to wet the slate-cleaning sponges that dangled from the desks. During my second school year there were moments of sheer smugness when in the schoolyard I heard jealous murmurs of “Teacher’s pet!” Something was awaiting me, though—an event that was to reduce—at least for long—the vanity so fondly built up within me by my tenderhearted parents and my ever gallantly devoted sister.

It happened at a children’s party. The sunshine of that ancient afternoon is warm and strong in my mind’s eye now; I see myself setting forth, newly polished shoes glistening, wide collar white about my slender throat, and in my head and heart nothing but eagerness to take the coming joy. It was a large and, at first, a decorous party. Among the throng of sleeked boys moved exquisite maidens with golden curls, pink or white or pale blue fluffy dresses, and gleaming little slippers—but for me the shiniest pink satin sash was that of little Hattie. In my tremulous perception of her she hadn’t any last name and didn’t need any; she was just a beautiful pinky blond glow called Hattie.

Children played kissing games in those days. At that party we played post office. All of the little girls withdrew to the hall outside the large room where the boys remained; we stood in a circle, every one of us behind a vacant chair. The grown-up hostess, by the closed door, asked the boy nearest to her to mention the name of one of the little girls. That boy then spoke the name of her who was his heart’s first choice; whereupon the lady opened the door and called out: “A lovely letter for little Olive!” Little Olive entered from the hall and the door was closed.

With solemn silence all about her, she looked over the vacant chairs and conscientiously seated herself in one of them. If it was the chair behind which stood the boy who had sent her the letter, he now publicly kissed her; then she demurely returned to the hall. If she took the wrong chair, the boys all clapped their hands derisively, upon which she would rush back to the hall, not so demurely.

My turn came, and, from a quivering throat, I contrived to utter the revered name. Our hostess opened the door and called, “A lovely letter for little Hattie!”

I realized that in a moment a sacred being would appear in the doorway; a terrible agitation shook me. “Shook” is the right word. I trembled excessively, comprehending too late that if Hattie should seat herself in the right chair—mine—I couldn’t kiss her. I didn’t know how; and I looked upon her as unapproachable, a rosy ethereality rather than a fellow mortal. Stage fright took me; and four feet behind me there was an open window. As the ineffable form of little Hattie appeared in the doorway, with all eyes upon her, I found myself to be descending toward green grass. I was falling through fresh air and late-afternoon sunshine, having uncontrollably jumped out of the window.

I crawled away and sat with my back against a brick wall. Indoors, I thought, all must be in turmoil as unprecedented as the act that caused it: the game broken up, the party ruined, the hostess noisily indignant, everybody shouting to everybody else, “He sent Hattie his letter—and then he wasn’t there!” I was disgraced, notorious, a pariah; and I couldn’t go home to hide my shame. To leave a party before it was over was an action of itself unthinkable, and my hat was in the “gentlemen’s dressing room.” Nobody could go home without his best hat; he couldn’t.

A Deflated Eight-Year-Old

Furtive, despairing, I lurked in shadows that ominously grew longer. Sunset had come when at last I crept round that large house to slide in by the back door—for if I faced hell itself I had to get my hat. On the rear veranda three large ice-cream freezers stood exhausted; refreshments—insanely forfeited by me—were of the past, and the party must be near its shocked close. I slipped into the kitchen unnoticed, passed quiveringly through a rear hall, opened a door—and was at the party again. Boys and girls in paper caps were whooping, running, charging into one another, falling down, upsetting furniture, and banging all over the house in the liberated exhilaration that is the last stage of a successful children’s party.

I’d expected a dreadful outcry; I’d thought to see dozens of accusing fingers pointed at me and to hear a cruel damning chorus, “There he is!” Clutching hands would be upon my shoulders while horrid voices screamed for the hostess to come and do her will upon me: “Mrs. Browning, hurry! We’ve caught Booth Tarkington! Here he is!”

Nobody even looked at me; I might have been an invisible boy. The late Mr. Dillinger walking into a crowded police station only to find himself utterly ignored might have felt part of what emotion then possessed me.

I caught a friend by the arm as he was dashing by me.

“Page, wait!” I begged. “What did Hattie do?”

“Let go me!” Page said. “What did Hattie do when?”

I gulped. “When I—when I jumped out of the window.”

“Did you?” Page said. “Let go me! Sam Miller’s after me and I got to run!””

The truth came upon me strangely, strangely. Nobody knew that I’d jumped out of the window. Hattie didn’t know it—nobody in the world knew it. Nobody even knew that during most of that party I hadn’t been present. Where I was or what I did didn’t mean anything to anybody.

I was freed of guilt, but plunged into a profound meditation.

Through the early twilight I walked home alone, with my head down and my shiny shoes moving slowly. Something had departed out of me and I seemed to consist of a walking vacancy. It was then, at about eight and a half years of age, that I lost a great part of the puffed-uppedness devotedly blown into me for years by loved ones at home. For the first time I seemed to perceive that I was nobody at all. So, during that slow trudge homeward after the party, I ceased to be a little child and became a growing boy.

1. On July 29, 1869.

2. Newton Booth—brother of Tarkington’s mother Elizabeth—assumed the governorship of California on December 8, 1871. He served until February 1875, when, having been elected to the U.S. Senate, he resigned.

3. The Hunchbergs, Simpledoria, and Bill Hammersly all appear in Tarkington’s Beasley’s Christmas Party (1909). In that novella, Uncle Newton serves as the model for Congressman David Beasley, who entertains his handicapped young cousin Hamilton Swift, Jr., by playing games with Simpledoria and the imaginary Bill Hammersley (spelled this way) and by having the Hunchbergs for dinner. Beasley’s Christmas Party itself is a reworking of Tarkington’s story “Beasley and the Hunchbergs,” published in Cosmopolitan in 1905. The names Beasley and Hunchberg show up, too, in unpublished Tarkington juvenilia.

4. Newton Booth first arrived in California in 1850.

5. Tarkington alludes here to his alcoholism. He swore off alcohol for good in early 1912, soon after he had suffered a heart attack—and after his first wife, Louisa, divorced him.