Read Online A Visit to Priapus and Other Stories by Glenway Wescott - Free Book Online Page A

mistake.
    For the son-in-law was not listening to the arguments. He was swallowing his food without chewing it, deaf with resentment, deaf to all but the little cries resounding through the house. It was his child, not theirs. Insolent with a sense of his dependence on them, and without hesitation they were robbing him of his natural authority; were making decisions and educating and punishing his son as they saw fit. And his son was to be a gentleman; why should he be initiated into their sad cult of self denial? He stared at his wife as if he saw in her only a member of that family.
    They all sat in silence while the babe wept.
    It was a warm evening almost as bright as noon. This was the weather of the poor; the atmosphere was a sufficient clothing and shelter, and it seemed nourishing—did one actually need much else?
    The tired grandmother, less impressed by the baby’s crying than by the red face of her daughter’s husband, the reactionary expression of her own, made a move to go. “Please don’t, dear,” her daughter said. “We should just have to begin again tomorrow.”
    Everywhere else it was the hour of pleasure. And a thousand automobiles were being transformed into vehicles of emotion, illusion; and through the groves young people were going down to the soft-shored lakes to play among the reeds; and in backyards the green clumps of lilac were filling up with fluffy pullets; at that time love usually ceased to torment and turned fecund; and so on. By thinking of these things, the son, unused to home, tried to escape in imagination from the too close reunion.
    The lament of the child, losing hope, grew strident. Suddenly the son-in-law dropped his fork on his plate, sprang to his feet, strode over to the window, stepping on his napkin, saying between his teeth, “I will not have a child of mine tied up like that. All your clever theories—what do I care?”
    “It can’t be helped, sweetheart. Please don’t mind. He’ll go to sleep in a minute. Please—” his wife pled sweetly, almost without inflection. His brother thought he heard a complaint wilder than the child’s, just subdued by that deliberate flat seraphic tone.
    “He is too little to be punished,” the young father said. He sat down but did not eat.
    “Refusing to satisfy him and punishing him are not at all the same thing.”
    Now his weeping was a low, rasping, almost religious refrain, and seemed to come from a distance.
    “I can’t help it. I can’t stand to hear him howling. I won’t. I’m going to clear out if it doesn’t stop right away, I tell you.”
    So powerless against him, it was a simple matter for her to answer firmly. “Very well, dear. Go. You’d better go for a while. I’ll telephone you as soon as our child has been disciplined. Run along.”
    Oh that voice like a deadened bell! Of course the young husband did not move. It was the first time this pair of lovers had had to quarrel with others present; and after birth and death, that is probably the most pitiful moment in existence.
    All the eyes around the table had a listless fixity. They all felt their humanity keenly.
    So, each one eating without appetite for the others to see, the meal drew to a close. The younger daughter, the maiden despising marriage and comforted by her provisory freedom, did better than the others. But the silence affected her more deeply than the words. She looked at her father because it was he that she loved best. Her brother’s eyes followed hers, and this is what they both saw in their father’s face: he too was piteously angry.
    Though quite out of sympathy with his son-in-law, he had caught his fever of male resentment. He, too, always wanted terribly to be the lord of his home. And now he wanted to be the hero of the scene, envied the scornful sympathy the other inspired and, thinking more and more inaccurately, resented the disapprobation the other deserved. “It ought to be against the law to treat a child like that,” he