Ceremony of the Innocent (8 page)

He had tried, over and over, to impart his thoughts to Francis, but Francis was becoming more and more resistive. Worse, he would fall into a sullen silence when his dreams encountered the sawtooth edges of reality. As a believer in the subjective, he vehemently believed that reality itself could be changed. He did not blame his faulty theories; he blamed reality. He had become suspicious of nature itself.

There is plenty of room in this world for dreamers—if the dreams are credible—Walter would think, and room for absolute realists. We must have a mingling of the two—if that is possible itself!—and work together. The only danger to the world is in those who believe only in dreams, and those who believe only in brutish facts. Both are dogmatists, and if we do not watch out we will be destroyed by them. We must concede, all of us, that man is more than an animal, but that he is an animal also, and has appetites that embrace the spiritual, yet also must be fed and watered and sheltered as any other beast. I detest the noncompromisers!

On another occasion he said to his son, “When God became man He had to obey His own laws: Evacuation of the bowels, urination, itches, pains, lusts of the flesh, as the parsons call it, hunger, labor, sweat, dirty hands and face, the necessity to wash and sleep, to change His garments, to scratch His feet. He did not suspend the laws of being in order to make Himself more comfortable in the environment which existed. We must accept the human condition, as He accepted it, with all its miseries, discomforts and complaints and insect bites and toil. As man, as well as God, He became annoyed at His Mother when she demanded that He perform the miracle of the wine at the marriage in Cana. A minor matter—but He was annoyed. There is a deep meaning in this: We cannot escape our flesh. We can only control it to a certain extent, but we cannot obliterate our nature, and the weaknesses of our nature. We can only have compassion—when it is deserved. And a sense of humor, which you lack, my boy. Humor makes life tolerable. There is no mention of it in the Bible, but I am pretty sure that Christ laughed frequently and joked and told interesting stories. After all, He was a Jew in the flesh, and Jews are famous for their wry jokes.”

Francis did not believe in any Deity, and he did not believe in Christ. But something in him was offended by his father’s speech. It threatened his concept of the grim perfectibility of man. Once he said meaningly to his father, “There is a new spirit growing in the world,” to which Walter had replied, “If it is what I think it is, then may God have mercy on our souls.”

On another occasion, in order to conciliate his beloved son, Walter had said, “My boy, there is enough room in this world for both of us.” He had looked pleadingly at Francis, but Francis had shut his face and had tightened his lips and had not replied. Consequently, and in increasing exasperation, Walter had begun to oppose any ideas of Francis’, some of which he privately agreed were worthy. Such as my son would choke the theories which are probable, he would think, and set men like myself obdurately against what we know ourselves to be good. That is disastrous to everybody.

Today, on extra urging, Francis went with his father for a drive through the country. Francis was not interested in farms and fields and the exuberance of nature in flower and fruit and grain. He was an urban man, which Walter regretted. There were too many urban men in the world these days. They were bored by the obvious; they thought labor demeaning. Worse still, they thought it unnecessary, and an affront to something they called “the dignity of man.” More and more, father and son were finding speech between them—honest and deep-hearted speech and self-revelation—impossible. Francis blamed his father. Walter was “old.” He had no concept of the “new world.” In his turn, Walter thought his son’s ideas resembled a bowl of lusty oatmeal and milk prematurely rancid, and poisonous. Ah, well, he would think, when Francis becomes older he will find that there are laws to contain impossible dreams, the laws of God and nature. The only idea which has splendor is the bountiful mercy of God—and we surely need it in these days!

Mrs. Jardin said to Ellen, in the kitchen: “Now we’ll go upstairs to do the bedrooms. The Missus makes her own bed, but there are the three others. Here is the mop and duster and the broom and the pail. Don’t stare at them. You know what they’re for, don’t you?”

Ellen had been permitted the scraps from Francis’ plate; she had devoured them with swift avidity, relishing every crumb. She had had a cup of coffee, which she thought delectable. She was surfeited, she was also sleepy, and it was only eight o’clock. “If you didn’t romp around all night,” said Mrs. Jardin with severity, “and behaved yourself like a Christian, you wouldn’t be so heavy-eyed.” As Ellen did not understand this, she could only accompany Mrs. Jardin in silence to the upper stories. Mrs. Jardin was a perfectionist for everybody but herself, something which would have interested Walter Porter, ironically.

The many bedrooms upstairs were as vast as the rooms below, but were so weightily populated with dark and corpulent furniture that they gave the impression of being thrust together in a small space, and even overlapping. As on the lower floor the light here was dun and shrouded, the air stifling. Every window was filled with shirred gray silk blinds, as well as lace curtains and dark-blue velvet draperies; the shutters were half closed. But here and there a ruddy needle of sunlight pierced a crevice at the choked windows and darted across a rug, or a wider bar made the edge of a mahogany arm redly incandescent. There were, in addition to beds with high corner posts and canopies, carved wardrobes gloomily closed and locked, dressers, chests, chairs, settees, tabourets holding bloated Chinese bowls in which a struggling plant fought for its life, and funereal pier mirrors. There was a dusty smell of lavender in each room, or cloves, or bay rum or dead roses.

“Rich, ain’t it?” said Mrs. Jardin, looking about her as Ellen labored. The girl’s face was running with sweat; she licked it away around her mouth. I think it is terrible, she thought, with her very new rebelliousness. So she pretended not to hear Mrs. Jardin’s complacent remark and dusted and swept and shook with feverish swiftness. She saw her first bathroom, in this house, and was genuinely awed by all that marble and whiteness and polished brass and taps.

Still, it seemed to her not at all clean to have privies in the house, and she breathed as lightly as possible. She knew nothing of Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress
or its Slough of Despond, but she felt caught in something which dulled her soul while it terrified her.

She was sent to the cellar to iron, and here the air, though as still as stone, was at least cooler than the air upstairs. There were men’s shirts damply piled in profusion in baskets, endless sheets, lace-edged pillowcases and shams, a woman’s discreet and billowing underwear, napkins, tablecloths, “runners,” and mounds of stockings, as well as corset covers and petticoats and aprons and lawn dresses and “wrappers,” and men’s drawers. The flatirons warmed on a hot plate, the first Ellen had ever seen, and she did not mind the rank odor of gas in her gratitude that the plate did not heat the cellar as a wood stove would have heated it. But the gas made her languid and faintly nauseated and gave her a headache. The hours passed in a semi-slumbrous way. For Ellen was indulging herself in her usual fantasy of wide lawns at sunset, with long golden shadows creeping over grass and roses, and of white houses with glittering free glass, of bright roofs and green vines, of soft music and peace, and somewhere, she herself, in a pale sprigged gown, walking serenely in the scented silence with a flower in her hand. And waiting. But for what or whom she waited she did not know.

“Ain’t you done yet?” Mrs. Jardin’s girlish voice shrilled down the stairway. “It’s four o’clock. Need your help in the kitchen.”

Ellen came to herself. She finished ironing a handkerchief; the cellar was pervaded now not only with the smell of gas but with the sweetness of beeswax. She was amazed to discover that all the ironing was finished, for she had moved automatically. She ran up the stairs and announced that the baskets were filled; she carried one, thrusting herself upwards and panting with the weight. Mrs. Jardin was skeptical; she critically examined the articles within the basket, and said with grudging, “Well, you’re good for something after all. Wouldn’t have believed it, a flighty miss like you.”

Ellen was set to work helping with the dinner, which would be at half past five, for this was a weekday. Now she was aware of smarting eyes and pulsing arms and heaviness in her legs. Her hair was a shimmering and glowing mass of tendrils about her face, which had lost its color and had become ghostly with exhaustion. But she was not hungry; her nausea lingered. “You’re all sweaty, and you smell, and you can’t go into the dining room tonight looking and smelling like that,” said Mrs. Jardin. “Better wear something clean tomorrow, I warn you.” The pink cotton frock was stained with perspiration and cobwebs and dust, and Ellen looked at it with dim dismay. She wanted only to fall down and sleep in some lightless spot, and now she would have to wash and iron this dress tonight.

She faintly refused the scraps tonight; the odor of roast beef sickened her and she had to clench her teeth against a vomitous urge when she smelled the roasted onions and the hot apple pie. However, she concealed a wedge of pie and some slivers of fat and meat and a roll or two in her apron for her aunt. Something uneasily stirred in her at this pilfering which had never stirred before.

The sweltering streets seethed with people, as usual, when she left at nearly seven. She did not run this evening; she did not pause to look at the distant mountains drifting in a purple mist, nor was she exhilarated at the smoldering ball of the sun. She walked slowly, her head bent, painfully pushing one foot ahead of the other, and never heard the customary jeers and obscene whistles. Her hair fell like copper silk about her face; her lips were colorless. Her feet were not flesh; they were molten metal and each step was an agony.

May Watson was industriously sewing in the parlor, the treadle machine squeaking and protesting. The room was dusky, for kerosene was expensive. But she looked up, startled, when she saw Ellen, and blinked.

“Did they dismiss you, Ellen?” she cried. “You were supposed to work ‘til ten!”

Ellen leaned against the settee and said in a voice so weak that May could hardly hear it, “No, Auntie. Mrs. Porter said from six to seven was all, and she’s going to give me a dollar a week, not just seventy-five cents.”

May was stunned by this magnanimity on the part of a woman she both despised and reverenced. She blinked rapidly, then rubbed her scorched eyes. “Well, then!” she exclaimed. “You must show your gratitude, Ellen! Go back at once and work ‘til ten. You didn’t leave Mrs. Jardin to finish up in the kitchen all alone, did you?” She was shocked and alarmed.

Ellen closed her eyes in complete despair. “No. We were all finished. Mrs. Jardin—she was pleased. She said I was better than Alice, and worked real fast and deserved the dollar. Oh, Aunt May! I can’t go back, not even if they needed me tonight! I—I feel sick. I just want to lie down, somewhere.”

May peered at her niece and her sense of what was “right” fought with pity. “You do look peaked,” she said. “That’s because you stayed up, chattering last night.” She had another thought. “Did you get your supper? That was agreed.”

Ellen whispered. “Yes. And I brought you something, the way you bring me things. It’s in the kitchen.”

She looked down at her frock. May uttered a sharp sound. “How did you get so dirty and wet? You’re real careless, Ellen. Now you’ve got to wash and iron it right away, to wear tomorrow.”

“Please,” said the exhausted girl. “Let me wear the blue tomorrow. I—Aunt May—I just can’t stand up any longer. I’ve got to lie down.”

“A big strong girl like you! Wait ‘til you get my age! Well, go along.”

Drugged with weariness, Ellen moved with extreme slow effort out of the room and into her airless bedroom. She pulled off her clothes, not neatly as usual. She pulled on her wrinkled nightgown. She fell on the bed and was immediately asleep, curled up like a puppy.

Two hours later May Watson turned down the lamp in the kitchen, and with her own weariness she moved towards her bedroom. But she paused at the door of Ellen’s room. The light from the distant streetlamp fell through the doorway and May saw the half-crouched motionless mound on the bed. There was something infinitely pathetic in the amorphous contour of the girl’s body, and May, her eyes wetting, said to herself, “Oh, Ellen, Ellen.”

Through her opened window May Watson saw the moon, a huge fat white spider caught in a thin web of drifting clouds, and now it was not only her body which ached but her soul also.

C H A P T E R   4

JEREMY, THE SON OF THE MAYOR, returned today from his visit to the young lady in whom he had been interested. A vital young man, a business administration student at Harvard, he was both lusty and cautious, virile without undo pugnaciousness, intelligent and cynical, pragmatic and exigent. He concealed a formidable power of intellect under an abrupt and offhand manner. He had no use for fools, for the sentimental or the trivially expedient; his particular hatreds were for the maudlin, the endlessly smiling, the cliche-speakers, the average, the mediocre. He had no love or mercy for “the people,” which included, in his ruthless category, his own parents. Preston, the village of some five thousand “dolts,” appalled him, and always had. The house of his parents revolted him; their manner of living provoked him to execrations. The Mayor had always considered his son “difficult.” Mrs. Porter adored him, though often he bewildered her with what she called “crude remarks. They aren’t nice, you know, dear.”

“Nothing is ‘nice’ in this world, Mama,” he would reply. “It is ruled by the law of the jungle, ‘The race to the swift, the battle to the strong.’ I don’t intend to be one of the weak. If we don’t watch out the weak will devour us, body and substance and country, and leave only bones behind. They have such appetites!”

“You will learn,” she would remark. “After all, dear, you are only twenty-three years old, a mere boy.” She did not know that her son had never been a “mere boy,” not even in infancy.