Read Online The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead - Free Book Online Page A

Monday. Mrs. Wilson, too, “big as she was, big as an ox,” was insulted by great big brutes of workmen, with sweaty armpits, who gave her a leer, and Mrs. Wilson, too, had to tell grocers where they got off, and she too had to put little half-starved cats of girls, thin as toothpicks, in their places. Mrs. Wilson it was who saw the ravishing Charlotte Bolton (daughter of the lawyer, who lived in a lovely bungalow across the street), she saw “my lady, standing with her hands on her hips, waggling her bottom and laughing at a man like a common streetgirl,” and he “black as the inside of a hat, with dark blood for sure.” Louie and Evie, and the obliging little boys, tugging at the piles of greasy clothes on Mondays, puffing under piles of new-ironed linen on Tuesdays, would be silent for hours, observing this world of tragic faery in which all their adult friends lived. Sam, their father, had endless tales of friends, enemies, but most often they were good citizens, married to good wives, with good children (though untaught), but never did Sam meet anyone out of Henny’s world, grotesque, foul, loud-voiced, rude, uneducated, and insinuating, full of scandal, slander, and filth, financially deplorable and physically revolting, dubiously born, and going awry to a desquamating end.
    After Henny had talked her heart out to her sister, Aunt Hassie, or to Bonnie even (though she despised a Pollit), or to her bosom friend, Miss Spearing, she would sometimes go, and after a silence, there would steal through the listening house flights of notes, rounded as doves, wheeling over housetops in the sleeping afternoon, Chopin or Brahms, escaping from Henny’s lingering, firm fingers. Sam could be vile but always as a joke. Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world, and when she told her children tales of the villainies they could understand, it was not to corrupt them, but because, for her, the world was really so. How could their father, said she, so fool them with his lies and nonsense?
    The chair, and the slanting of the light, the endless insoluble game of solitaire, were as comfortable to Henny’s ravaged nerves as an eiderdown. In the warmth of the late afternoon, some time before she expected to hear the rush of feet, she would sit there at her third or fourth game and third or fourth cup of tea. So sitting she would seem to herself to be bathing in the warm moisture of other summers. She would see the near rush or distant slow-moving glitter on the steeps of North Charles Street, see the half-dry fountain with a boat in Eutaw Place, which could be seen from the front windows of the brownstone house Hassie had there, and the hot-smelling, rose-colored stoops flowing down and up the gully: see the masts of little boats and the barges, the sole twinkle of a car on the bridge; see the hot, washed windows of dressmakers and the tasseled curtains of a club, the dormant steps of little night bars, the yellow and pink of some afternoon-tea place where she had gone with Hassie when she was a schoolgirl. Or if the wind was high and her headache had not yet come on, she could smell the brackish and weakly salt streams of the Chesapeake, scudding in her cousin’s twelve-footer, or her father’s motorboat; feel the sounds and scents of Saturdays long swept away on the long rollers of years, when she was a thin-blooded, coquettish girl, making herself bleed at the nose for excitement, throwing herself on the lawns of Monocacy in a tantrum, spitting fire at the servants, coaxing her father, waiting for the silly toys her father would buy her—engagement to a commercial fortune, marriage to a great name, some unexpected stroke of luck in blue-blooded romance, social fun, nursemaids, two fashionable children in pink and blue. These things surged out of the past, as she sat there, but faintly, no more distinct than a wind that is blowing ten miles off and sometimes sends a puff of