Everybody's Autobiography (19 page)

That is what makes today today that there is very little remembering done.

After my mother died we went on doing what we had done but naturally our father was more a bother than he had been, that is natural enough. Hitherto we had naturally not had to remember him most of the time and now remembering him had begun.

Mike had come back from the East, so we were all together, except that Leo had had typhoid fever and they thought he ought to become a vineyardist naturally that was not very interesting, and they thought that Simon should become a rancher but it was not very amusing to any of them and he came back to be a gripman, and Mike came back to manage a street railroad of which my father was vice-president and I stopped going to school Mike thought I ought to be a musician, not that I was ever interested in music naturally not, and Bertha was to do the housekeeping.

Naturally my father was not satisfied with anything, that was natural enough.

And after that we did all do that.

Naturally our father was very often irritated.

He told Mike that he had to make up his mind to take out his sister, that was Bertha, he would have to do it sooner or later. Mike muttered that he would take his later.

Later Mike when my father was very irritated said that after all if a man could not manage to have what he wanted he should not come home and be irritable as after all it was for him to decide what he wanted. Mike was always reasonable that is to say he always was until he had a son of his own. He said fathers should not be irritable because they could not manage outside matters.

Many years later not so very long ago when Mike was impatient with his son I said but Mike you always understood so well that every one wants what they want and you always let Leo and myself have it, Mike had been our guardian after our father died, and now you have a son and you are irritable and you see no sense in what he wants. Oh said Mike you do not understand it is different, a son irritates you differently from any other irritation and when a son irritates you you are irritated.

Well feudal days were the days of fathers and now once more these days are the days of fathers.

Well anyway we all went on. And I like to have been it, because
everything that was inside could be inside where anything is, and so we all went on. And then it was the spring or summer.

Before this Mike had come to be in San Francisco and we had come to know a lot about everything. That is what happened when things were being done.

Much later on I first was interested in Fitzgerald because in This Side Of Paradise he described what happened when there was no longer any money in street railroads. He only stated it but it made me like it.

Street railroads were interesting. Now the last tram has just been taken off the streets of Paris but street railroads were only interesting to us when they were in San Francisco.

The only other that ever interested me were the trolleys without tracks they had in an Italian hill town and in Chambery, not that it had anything to do with me I never went on it but it was interesting.

And so we began to know what every one did who did anything. I often have said that it is a puzzle to me that a boy just out of school goes into his father's office and they give him a lot of papers and nobody gave him papers before and he seems to know what to do with them.

We asked Mike what he did because he was supposed to be managing a branch line and they were to do some new work on it. Where do you get your men we asked him. Oh you lean on the wall and first one and then more come, he said. That is the way they did then. We then used to be puzzled because he said he was very good at making up time-tables and we knew he never could do arithmetic, we always used to have to do percentage for him and division and addition and subtraction but he was very good at making up very complicated time-tables so everybody said. And then sometimes he came home and he was pretty sick. He said that was because they wanted to have a new franchise and he had to meet the men who could give it to them. No one in the
family ever liked drinking. They smoked very good cigars very good cigars and they knew a lot about tobacco as was the habit in California but they never did care for drinking. And so we were interested in what they did, but all we knew was that Mike would be pretty sick and did not care much about anything then. But what we liked most Leo and I was to go and call for him at his office. We had by that time been given an allowance for spending, but naturally we bought books with it, we always bought books with it, I bought a Shelley in green and Morocco binding and we bought an illustrated set of Thackeray and we had a simple book plate made and when we went to call for Mike in the evening when we had gone to the city as everybody in Oakland going over to San Francisco called San Francisco we never had any more money, Mike would always sigh but he liked to have us with him and so he would take us out to dinner but before that we would sit and watch him disciplining.

Any gripman or conductor who had done anything he should not do would be sent in to see him. Mike who never knew what to say unless he was really angry and then would say if this kind of thing goes on I will throw up the whole damn business, used to stand with his head down, the man would go on and Mike his face very solemn would stand with his head down and then would mutter something. And we in the background knowing what Mike was feeling were thoroughly enjoying the situation. The men dreaded being sent in to Mike because he never said anything and only looked solemn.

Then he would take us out to dinner, and San Francisco was a nice place in those days to be taken out to dinner by a brother.

And it all went on until one spring or summer.

Then one morning we could not wake up our father. Leo climbed in by the window and called out to us that he was dead in his bed and he was.

Then we stayed where we were a little longer and then we
moved to San Francisco. Mike was our guardian as Leo and I were minors and I remember going to a court for the only time I was ever in one, to say that we would have him.

It was a funny place it all seemed to have so much raw wood in it the floors and the walls and all sorts of things in it, and we were in and we were out and that was all there was to it.

Then our life without a father began a very pleasant one.

I have been thinking a lot about fathers any kind of fathers.

After all civilization has only lasted about five thousand years and five thousand is an awfully small number to see anywhere now. This is the epoch of big figures and five thousand is not much of a one.

And fathers come up and fathers go down. That is natural enough when nobody has had fathers they begin to long for them and then when everybody has had fathers they begin to long to do without them. Sometimes barons and dukes are fathers and then kings come to be fathers and churchmen come to be fathers and then comes a period like the eighteenth century a nice period when everybody has had enough of anybody being a father to them and then gradually capitalists and trade unionists become fathers and which goes on to communists and dictators, just now everybody has a father, perhaps the twenty-first century like the eighteenth century will be a nice time when everybody forgets to be a father or to have been one. The Jews and they come into this because they are very much given to having a father and to being one and they are very much given not to want a father and not to have one, and they are an epitome of all this that is happening the concentration of fathering to the perhaps there not being one.

Well anyway, we had a time with only a brother not a father, and a father as Mike later so well explained to me is different after all he is a father.

Soon we left East Oakland and went to live in San Francisco. We went to live on Turk Street, of course at that time everybody
lived in a house alone, they still do pretty much in America, and it was a pleasure to see all those wooden houses a wonderful pleasure but all that will come later.

We did move in all of us together and once we all were tired of unpacking and Mike had been left alone in the cellar and we all had commenced eating and Mike came up in the dining room and he was furious with every one and he said if this sort of thing was going to go on he would throw up the whole damn business. Whenever he said that we all surrounded him to placate him. Anything but that he should throw up the whole damn business. He used to make nice little jokes too that pleased us and Leo and I always liked giving him a book to read, he never read any book except one that we gave him and that he always read from the beginning to the ending. He always had these pleasant little ways he still has them.

One night there was a big fire one of those nice American fires that have so many horses and firemen to attend them and Mike very frightened came up to see that we were all safe and none of us were awake and he was furious with us because none of us had heard anything and he was the only one awake. And then one night the night-watchman woke us up because some one had left the front parlor window wide open, and he had to go down and close it to please the watchman not that it made any difference to any of us but Mike said we had to please the watchman. We lived like this for a year or more. I know I was most awfully shocked when Mike brought home my father's business books and Leo and I went through them with him. There were so many debts it was frightening, and then I found out that profit and loss is always loss, that did not worry us as much as there being estate debts, but Mike explained that this always happened in a business and it was all right, because we always had a habit in the family never to owe anybody any money.

I have been writing a series of articles in the Saturday Evening
Post about money and what is money. And it is awfully funny about money. I am sure that there is no difference between men and animals except the power to count and if you count you do count money. Just now nobody counts in any small numbers such as thousands and millions they have to go very much higher, but then any counting was counting and large sums were just beginning. They really did begin first with England in the Napoleonic wars and later with us and the Civil war and now they are not overwhelming because the imagination has gotten used to them which is natural enough. After all there is one one one and there are the stars' light traveling and anything else there can be. Do not forget that everything is as it is even if it is. All right we lived in San Francisco more than a year. During that time we sometimes had visitors from the East, that is relatives and cousins. Naturally we had not known them but they came to see us. The first one that came was another Simon Stein quite another one. He was a gentle Simon Stein and a quiet one and he said nothing that is to say he did not say much of anything and that evening when he left my brother Simon went with him to the train and when Simon came back he said that Simon Stein had said to him thank you for seeing me to the train when you come to Baltimore I will be sure to do that for you. And we all laughed and we all laughed louder and Simon said he thought all the way home that there was something funny about Simon Stein when he said good-bye to him.

Later another one this time not a Simon but a Hattie came and she had just been married and her husband was a big man. They talked more than Simon Stein had and nobody went with them to the train.

These were all on my father's side of the family those on my mother's side naturally never came.

Anybody can think a lot about money. It is funny about money, there are such different ways of counting money, but everybody
anybody is counting and is counting money. The Keysers my mother's people and the Steins my father's people had very different ways of counting money. So have we all.

When I was at Radcliffe I was to pass my entrance examinations after I had been there some years. I had left the high school young and I had never learned French and German having had it and forgotten it and I knew a lot but still there were some examinations that knowing a lot did not help advanced Latin was one and so Margaret Lewis a graduate student was to teach me enough to get through. We worked together and I was to pay her at the end of the month. I had paid her and then one month I had spent all my month's money in going to the opera and so I said to her do you mind if I do not pay you as I have not got any money. She said no reflectively and then she said what do you mean when you say you have no money, Oh I said I mean I have spent my month's money and I haven't any. Well she said reflectively your father and mother are dead you have your own money haven't you. Yes I said. Well then she said you have the money to pay me now I do not need it but you have it so you must not say you haven't got it. Yes I said but you see I cannot use that because that is what I have not got I only have a month's money, yes she said but you see those who earn money have not got it but then when they have not got it they have not got it. I was much surprised and I never forgot it. Now I am not so much surprised because after all an income is an income whether you earn it or whether you have it and I was right and she was right about it. Sometimes everybody wonders whether there is going to be one kind of income or another kind. Jessie Whitehead used to say during the war, after the war there is not going to be any more cream to put on strawberries and when I am an old lady I will tell my grandchildren there used when you ate strawberries to be something called cream and I will describe it to them and they will marvel at it. Anyway there does seem to be a great deal of
cream all the same, more cream than ever one might say, and so Jessie Whitehead cannot tell her grandchildren about the wonderful thing called cream which they have never seen just as Picasso cannot listen to his old friends sitting around with their wooden legs telling about their war campaigns. Jo Davidson says that what he wants is everybody to have an income then nobody will worry about anything, well anyway an income if it does not go away is very comforting and does not need so much counting as other kinds of counting. Afterwards while I was still at college I did realize that my uncles and cousins they were richer than we were and they knew less about everything they did not realize that anybody needed to be paid right away, they always paid of course but they did not realize that waiting was complicating. But now what happens, well now nothing happens, there are a great many more who have an income, but even so counting is really pleasant when there is something to count.