The Homemaker quotes

“Stephen!” She called quickly and stood listening for an answer, her fine dark brows drawn together tensely.

The house waited emptily with her for the answer which did not come.

“Stephen!” she shouted, turning so that her voice would carry up the stairs.

“Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick—” whispered the little mantelpiece clock hurriedly in the silence.

She was rarely quiet enough to hear that sound, but when it did come to her ears, it always said pressingly, “So much to do! So much to do! So much to do!”

She looked at it and frowned. Half-past two already! And that floor only half scrubbed. What possessed people to call you up on the telephone at all hours? Didn’t anybody realize what she had to do!

If I do that, give up everything I’d like to do to stay here and cook things for you, you ought to be able to remember, don’t you think, not to eat other things?”

Her tone was reasonable. Her logic was unanswerable. Henry shrank to even smaller dimensions as he lay helpless on the bed.

She did not say a word to his father about having allowed Henry to eat the cookie. She never criticized their father before the children.

“We could if we tried!” she said, quelling them by her accent. She looked around at them with burning eyes.

She was like a falcon in a barnyard.

“A visiting nurse would cost—let us say a thousand a year.”

Her voice was harsh and dry; but they all knew why. And she was quite aware of the silent glosses and commentaries she knew them to be supplying mentally. She pinned her roll of sewing together firmly.

Nobody could put in a pin with her gesture of mastery.

“My first duty is to my home and children,” she said.

It was time for him to beat it back upstairs if he didn’t want to be late. How he loathed his lifelong slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse.

“It’s the clock that is the naysayer to life,” he thought, as he climbed the cellar stairs.

He hurried upstairs, dressed and began to shave.

Especially a white woman. The opinion of a man who couldn’t make money was of no value, on any subject, in anybody’s eyes. The dignity of a man who could not make money—but why talk about nonexistent abstractions?

He had about as much dignity left him as a zero with the rim off.

His after-breakfast dyspepsia began to roll crushingly over his personality as it always did for a couple of hours after each meal. His vitality began to ebb. He felt the familiar, terrible draining out of his will-to-live.

A tenth? A hundredth! The living, miraculous, infinitely fragile fabric of the little human souls they lived with—did they treat that with the care and deft-handed patience they gave to their filet-ornamented table linen?

No, they wrung it out hard and hung it up to dry as they did their dishcloths.

And of course what Jerome Willing wanted of every employee was to join with all his heart in this conspiracy to force women still more helplessly into this slavery to possessions.

… was all with him, with his weakness, with his feeble vitality, with his futile disgusts at the organization of the world he lived in, with his unmanly failure to seize other men by the throat and force out of them the things his family needed.

Sympathy for childhood nothing! If he felt any real sympathy for his own children, he’d somehow get more money to give them.

What were fathers for, if not for that? If he were a “man among men,” he would do as other manly men did:

Evangeline gloried in the brilliant good looks of girls! There was a period between eighteen and twenty-three when it was as good as a feast to dress one.

Mrs. Peterson was drawn along after her enthusiasm as a piece of paper is drawn fluttering after an express train.

She said, “Well, I had come to say that Mr. Peterson and I have about decided that it was too expensive a suit for Evelyn, but now I’m here, I guess I’ll look at it again.”

But then, he thought again (one of the slow thoughts which occasionally pushed their way up to his attention), he had never seen Stephen except in active conflict with authority.

“I never saw one of my children just living before,” he meditated.

As he lay in bed, a book was usually open before him, but he looked over it at the far more interesting spectacle of his undiscovered little boy.

He was more horrified at the position in which he found himself, absolute arbiter over another human being, a being who had no recourse, no appeal from his decisions. It was indecent, he thought; it sinned against human dignity, both his and the child’s. …

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master!”

he cried to himself, shamed to the core by Stephen’s helpless dependence on his whim, a dependence of which Stephen was so tragically aware, all his stern bulwarks of anger and resistance broken down by the extremity of his fear—fear for what he loved!

In the silent room he heard it echoing solemnly, “That’s what it is to be a parent.”

He had been a parent for thirteen years before he thought of it.

He looked over the edge of his bed at Stephen and abased himself silently.

Why had Stephen so shut himself up?

The question was as new to Lester as a question of the cause of the law of gravity.

It had never occurred to him that perhaps Stephen had not been born that way.

“Father does. We all do,” said Helen. “Father’s a lovely cook. He’s learning out of the cookbook. And so am I—learning, I mean. We’re learning together.”

Aunt Mattie’s face instantly smoothed into comprehension of everything. She had wondered how they managed without a woman to keep house for them. Now she knew. They didn’t manage.

“Oh …” she said, and, “Well. …”

She knew how shocking this was on Stephen’s part, and added apologetically, “He’s so little, you know. He doesn’t understand how terrible it is for poor Father. And Father tells him stories. All the time, almost. Stephen loves them.

Mother was always too busy to tell stories, you know.

”

It was a great pleasure to him to be able to say the strong short Saxon words aloud. For years he had been shutting into the cage of silence all the winged beautiful words which came flying into his mind!

And beautiful words which you do not pronounce aloud are like children always forced to “be quiet” and “sit still.” They droop and languish.

But before this it would have been too foolish to repeat the lovely lines that came into his mind. What would Harvey Bronson have thought to hear “the army of unalterable law” pronounced in the office of Willing’s Emporium?

Where were those lines? Towards the end of the book, wasn’t it, just below that quaint marginal note of

Men thrive in the Valley of Humiliation.

It was where the pilgrims were going—yes, now he remembered the very words with that exactitude of memory which had been such a golden thing in his life, “They were going along talking and espied a boy feeding his father’s sheep.

But he saw at once that he had shocked not her sense of the proper attitude about Aunt Emma but about himself. She had come over prepared to “sympathize” with him.

Mattie always had to go through the proper motions.

“How are you getting on, Lester?” she asked earnestly, with her best Ladies’ Guild flatness of intonation. “You can’t imagine how I have worried about you and poor Eva and the dear children.

Mattie turned, saw what he was doing and pounced on him with shocked, peremptory benevolence. “Oh, Lester, let me do that! The idea of your darning stockings! It’s dreadful enough your having to do the housework!”

“Eva darned them a good many years,” he said, with some warmth, “and did the housework. Why shouldn’t I?”

He looked at her hard and went on, “Do you know what you are saying to me, Mattie Farnham? You are telling me that you really think that homemaking is a poor, mean, cheap job beneath the dignity of anybody who can do anything else.”

“Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea But sad mortality o’ersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea. …”

It was not water that Helen Knapp drank out of the tin dipper hung over the sink. It was ambrosia.

And Father told her stories, too, all kinds, lots of funny ones that set them into gales of laughter!

Lester laughed ruefully. “Do I? Nothing but!

I often feel like a dog digging into a woodchuck hole, almost grabbing the woodchuck’s tail and never quite getting there.

”

But he was really looking at Stephen, standing with his stout legs wide apart, glowering at the prostrate but victorious eggbeater. In spite of his sympathetic sense of the seriousness of the moment Lester’s diaphragm fluttered with repressed laughter.

Cosmic Stephen in his pink gingham rompers!

He took up another stocking and ran his hand down the leg. Stephen sauntered over towards the beater, casually.

And I want every purchase at our counters to help every fine big farm-boy to shuck off his awkward countrified ways that put him at such a disadvantage beside any measly, little, cocksure, tenement-house rat!”

Experiences of his own past burned in his voice

, “We’re counting on you, Mrs. Knapp, to train your girls to have just the right manner with country customers. You know, cordial, but respectful, friendly, but no soft-soap business.”

He knew all about that sort of campaign from much experience, but he was never resigned to the necessity for it.

“Darn families and their sympathy!” he often said impatiently. “They ‘poor-Charlie’ and ‘poor-Mary’ more sick people into their graves than we doctors do.”

He had long suspected that well-meaning Mrs. Farnham did a good deal of “poor-Lestering” at the Knapps. Maybe this was a chance to head her off, to get her mind started along a new track.

He thought how in the blessed mental leisure which comes with small mechanical tasks he pored over this data, considered it and reconsidered in the light of some newer evidence—where was now a good-natured young hired girl, let her be ever so indulgent and gentle?

“You can’t hire somebody to be a parent for your children!”

he thought again, passionately. They are born into the world asking you for bread. If you give them a stone, it were better for you that that stone were hanged about your neck and cast into the sea.

How poor Eva, drugged by the cries of its devotees, had cast herself down under its grinding wheels—and had dragged the children in under with her. It wasn’t because Eva had not tried her best. She had nearly killed herself trying.

But she had been like a gifted mathematician set to paint a picture.

And he did have bread for them. He did not pretend he had not. He had found that he was in possession of miraculous loaves which grew larger as he dealt them out.