“Momma”
BY
RUPERT HUGHES
“MOMMA”4
By RUPERT HUGHES
Momma was sick, right sick. Momma was awful sick! Momma looked like she was going to die any minute. And she didn’t care if she did. She up and as good as told Poppa that.
Poppa was scared almost to death when he realized it. He was all alone with her, and had none of the children to talk to about it; though, for the matter of that, Momma and Poppa had never told the children about their own ailments. And now the children had growed up and vamoosed. All that was left of the fact that there ever had been any children round the place was the two old names Momma and Poppa that the old folks had caught by contagion and got to calling each other by from hearing themselves called them by the children when they were children.
Momma and Poppa had been drifting down life like a pair of old mud turtles floating south on an old log. And now all of a sudden one of them felt that the other’n was going to roll off into the muddy water and sink downward, backward, dead!
Perhaps the poor turtles know and grieve and mourn to the full capacity of their tight shells.
But Poppa was a human, gifted with sympathy. He was old acquaintances with grief of every sort, a pitiful postgraduate in all a man knows who has been a lover, a husband, and a father, and has seen children born from one pain and ache to another and another, who has seen some of his own little children die, or pray for death in the long procession of disappointments and thwarted hopes that begin with the first irretrievable rattle lost over the edge of the crib, and pass on to the rainy holidays, the sunny schooldays, the warm Christmases, cracked dolls, lost games, indignities from parents who misunderstand and spank, from sweethearts who misunderstand and flirt, and so on and so forth to the dreary, shabby campfollower sorrows that trudge along at the tail end of the parade.
Poppa’s habit had been to take things as they come, because, as somebody said, that’s the only way they come. He had grown so jaded with existence that he became a veteran Horatio, who, as Will Shakespeare said, “fortune’s buffets and rewards hast ta’en with equal thanks.”
Nothing had excited him much of late at the store, at home, at church, the lodge, or in the newspapers. As he had worn what seemed to be the same suit of clothes for years, so his face had worn the same suit of expressions. It was hard to tell his smile from his scowl. Funny things all had a touch of misfortune in them for somebody, and sad things were all kind of funny, so the same twitch at the muscles about his mouth served for an acknowledgment of everything unusual.
But now, when Momma almost wisht she was dead, that last dreadful word twitched Poppa’s very heart. He felt as if in the calm slumber of habitude somebody had reached into his breast and given his heart a yank. And it shivered and rattled as an old doorbell clamors pulled hard at midnight by somebody crying: “Wake up! Your house is on fire!”
Poppa woke up. Instinct told him that he must save Momma and himself from the incredible disaster of her death. His business worries had kept him from noticing the little symptoms of her decline, though she had stopped quarreling with him, and had simply quarreled with life, with everything: the food, the neighbors, her clothes, the weather, her stummick, her head, her eyes, her feet, her hands, her appetite, her looks—she even complained of her looks!
And now, as if scales had been scraped off his eyes, Poppa saw that Momma didn’t look good. She didn’t look a bit good. She looked something scandalous.
Poppa belonged to a lodge, and he had gone to numberless funerals. Yet he had hardly even imagined that some day his fellow members might in turn come to his house, all dressed up with sashes and plumes and swords, to march alongside the black wagon that should carry his one woman in a box to a ditch.
As if some one had set a moving picture going against the wall of his own sitting room, he saw the whole thing, and he shuddered back from it with a cry that struck inward and cut downward and stuck. He had a fishbone in his throat.
He became suddenly young and arrantly afraid. He wanted to run to his wife and cling to her and beg her not to think of such things. But he had given up the habit of hugging Momma or taking her into his lap or sitting on the arm of her chair since the ancient days when the first child began to take notice.
He wanted to go back to the old ways, but it would have looked foolish, and the two frumps had been afraid of each other’s love for years and years.
He did nothing and said nothing; but he did a heap of thinking. “Heap” was the word, for his thoughts were like a pile of dead leaves, tarnished, crumpled brown leaves that had been green and radiant and breathing once.
His thoughts were a heap of autumnal rubbish set on fire. Red torment ran through them, and they writhed and twisted as if a new life had come back to them just that they might suffer a little more.
The terror stung him to a determination. “I’ll call the doctor,” he said. He rose from his chair and shuffled to the telephone. Momma ran after him and dragged his hands down, crying: “I don’t want to see that old fool. I’ll go jump in the river if you send for him. I couldn’t stand the sight of him.”
“When a woman’s too sick to see the doctor,” Poppa said, “it’s high time somebody called him in.”
He backed round and bunted her away with the minimum of grace and the maximum of devotion, and held her at a distance until he got the number.
Momma flopped helplessly into a chair and cried like a petulant little girl, while Poppa ordered the doctor to put on his shoes and come right over.
She was still pouting like a little girl when Dr. Noxon came. Her lips were pushed out and her chin was purse-drawn when he asked her what was the matter of her. He held her wrist in one hand and his watch in the other, glanced at her tongue, and in a lowered voice asked one or two very personal questions.
Poppa did most of the talking, while Dr. Noxon nodded and said: “I see, I see.” As might have been expected, he left two sets of pills, one kind to be taken after each meal and before retiring, and another kind of pill to be taken on arising and every three hours.
Momma could hardly keep from laughing in the old owl’s face, and as soon as he closed the door she bust right out. It was not a nice laugh—hysterics like. She whooped: “I’ve seen that old nuisance leave those same fool pills on those same fool pieces of paper since we first came to Carthage and called him in. Everybody that ever took ’em has died, and I guess it’s my turn! And I don’t care!”
Her laughter ended in the wild weeping of a young girl, and Poppa was almost distracted. She went to bed all wore out, but she couldn’t sleep.
She kept him awake worse when she laid still trying not to wake him than she did when she thrashed about and groaned.
That was a long night, and Poppa entertained a whole herd of nightmares without falling asleep, or, if he did, he didn’t know it and it didn’t do him a mite of good.
He waited a day or two to see what effect Dr. Noxon’s immemorial pills would have. They had even less effect than he expected they would.
The third day he took the almost sacrilegious step of seeing one of the other doctors. Dr. Champe refused to call since Mrs. Lundy was known to be one of Dr. Noxon’s regular customers, a life member in his pill association.
But Poppa threatened to brain Champe if he didn’t see Momma, and he consented to see her if she would call after dark. Poppa had to drive her there “like a pig to market,” he said, and he was more wore out than what she was.
Dr. Champe gave spoon medicines. They were bittersweet and sticky, and had no effect whatever except to cause a brief ague of nausea and leave a nasty taste on the tongue.
A third doctor tried massage, another electricity. Momma even flirted with science—science with a capital S. But the optimism that was ladled out to her made her sicker than Dr. Champe’s sticky sweet medicine. She was in one of those moods when a cheerful word or a smile is a deadly insult.
The last doctor in town advised a trip, a change of climate and environment. Momma ridiculed the idea, but Poppa telegraphed their married daughter in Terre Haute that Momma was coming, and he fairly boosted her on the train.
Momma was dismal and ashamed of being dumped as a burden on a daughter she had always babied even after Hattie (now Mrs. Fred Eppes) had babies of her own. So the reunion lacked the delight that belonged to the occasion.
Hattie hugged her mother hard and squealed: “Why, Momma, you’re looking fine!”
Momma was doleful enough to remember her own woes, and she groaned: “You just say that! I don’t feel a bit good and I’m a sight! Don’t show me to any of your swell Terra Hut friends, for I’ll disgrace you.”
Hattie had hard sledding before her. Her mother did not even want to cheer up. She wanted to be sick, and she doubled her misery by bewailing the fact that she couldn’t throw off her gloom. She tried to smile once or twice, but Hattie begged her not to.
Since Momma would neither go calling nor receive callers, she was not easy to entertain. She was ashamed of her shabby clothes and her dowdy appearance, and so was Hattie.
Hattie would not admit it, though she did say that Poppa, with all his money, ought to dress her up better. Poor Poppa had tried to. The average American husband does not often get the chance to complain of his wife’s thrift in clothes, but Mr. Lundy, little as he noticed such things, had finally urged Momma to spend a little more money on duds now that the children were buying their own. But his well-meant hints had only depressed her the more, and she had retorted that he was sick and tired of her and her old face.
He had dropped the subject. Hattie had no better success. All that she succeeded in accomplishing was a round of the Terre Haute physicians—especially of those frightful personages known as “specialists.” Each of these found his specialty in Momma, and went after it. One of them got away with a large number of her teeth before she could fight him off.
Others offered to remove various parts of her, but she declined to be separated from any more of her fixtures.
She reduced Hattie’s general practitioner almost to nervous prostration, and at last, in order to get her off his hands and off her daughter’s nerves, he casually recommended a New York specialist, Dr. Courtneidge, who had the monopoly on a very abstruse operation dealing with the pancreas or something that Momma didn’t even know she had.
She was quite overawed at finding herself the proud possessor of such a thing. She felt like an old watch that has suddenly learned it has had jewelled movements all these years. But after a few hours of being interested in herself she slumped again and said she guessed she’d take her old pancreas back to Carthage with her. She’d got along with it so far, and, seeing as she’d denied herself a trip to New York all her life for fun, she certainly wa’nt going all that ways to let a doctor poke a knife into her.
Hattie fumed and bullied in vain for a day or two, then she fired off a telegram to Poppa to come over at once.
Poppa was putting through a big land deal and the telegram nearly jolted him out of his wits. He would not wait to extend his option. He ran down to the station and swung on a train just pulling out. He did not even stop for the collar, toothbrush, and nightgown that constituted his usual going-away equipment.
He spent a horrible night in the smoking car, sleeping among his distorted limbs like a wrecked grasshopper. At Terre Haute he took a taxicab to Hattie’s house, and was in such a mental and facial disarray when he rang the bell that the maid who answered it slammed the door on him and ran to tell her mistress that there was a crazy man on the porch.
Hattie peeked through the little side window and recognized her father, and flung open the door and her arms to him.
He expected to find Momma on her deathbed, but she was at breakfast, crying into her rolled oats.
“What on earth is the matter of you, Momma?” he gasped.
“Nothing’s the matter of me,” she snapped. “What on earth’s the matter of you? Had your breakfast? Sed-down! And—Hattie, could you ask your girl to fry him a negg—turned over, you remember; and if the coffee’s out, here you can have the rest of mine.”
Poppa sank into a chair and consented to break his fast while the news was broken to him. The word “pancreas” dazed him. It sounded like something for breakfast till Hattie explained. Then he was convinced. There is something about a new word that solves all mysteries for most people, and Poppa was very much like most people.
When Hattie had explained that Dr. Appleyard himself had settled upon the pancreas and its malfunctioning, or something like that, as the secret of Momma’s indomitable obscurities, Poppa set his jaw.
“When’s first train to N’York?” he asked.
“I’m not goin’, I tell you,” Momma pealed. “I’m not goin’ one step.”
“You are goin’!” Poppa stormed. “Why ain’t you goin’?”
“Because it costs too much money.”
That is a thing a man likes to say for himself. He cannot endure to hear anyone else tell it to him. It is insulting. When the children were young, Momma had always said it first when she wanted to make sure of his consenting to an expenditure. Things she would never have browbeaten or wept out of him into permitting, she could always force him to force her to accept by that approach—using the word “force” as card tricksters do when they deftly permit you to drag from them the one card that will work the trick.
But now Momma was not stacking the cards. She had economized for so many decades that money had become a thing sacrosanct. Unwittingly she had dealt Poppa the deadliest humiliation in her power, for he was what Carthage people called “rich”; he had lands and lands in his own and Momma’s name, and big sums out on mortgages.
A standard of living that had been forced on him by his early poverty had sufficed him in his gradual wealth.
A new suit of clothes was a nuisance. Extra servants were like unwelcome guests that never went home. The simplest food everlastingly repeated was all his stomach craved.
Momma would as soon have had the measles as a limousine, and jewels on her fingers would have crippled her like inflammatory rheumatism. The changing styles of Paris interested her as much as the tides of Barnegat. She had not changed the manner of wearing her hair since she was a mother for the first time, and her dresses were made by a sewing woman who was more interested in the gossip of the families she moved among than in the daily hints from Paris.
With money pouring in in amounts whose importance neither husband nor wife ever thought of translating into luxuries, and seeping out in a slow trickle, the old couple had come near to being misers without dreaming of stinginess.
This last big land deal of Poppa’s had brought him to a sudden realization that he was a pretty big fellow. The banks had begun to turn to him with opportunities for large turnovers, and bonds were offered him in bundles.
And so when Momma implied that a trip to New York, to save her life maybe, was beyond his means, he was hurt and enraged, and in his anger he rose to an eloquence of gallantry he never would have achieved in a more temperate mood.
“Too much money, hey? You think you can’t afford it, do you? Well, let me tell you that I can afford to send you to any town that anybody else can afford to go to. And if that old pankers doctor has got any patients at tall besides millionaires, and if he don’t charge more’n a hundred thousand dollars a patient, you can have the best operation he’s got in his shop.”
Momma braced up a bit at this and gave Hattie a proud look as much as to say: “You haven’t married the only successful man in the world, Mrs. Eppes.” But she shook her head.
“You ain’t goin’ to bankrupt yourself shippin’ me to any doctor, for I’m not worth it. And that’s all there is about it.”
“Not worth it?” Poppa cried with the fervor, if not the rhetoric, of a Romeo. “Well, if you ain’t worth it, I’d like to know who is? All I got is none too much to spend on you. And if I had ten times as much, what’d it be worth if I lost you, Momma?”
This was so poetic and beautiful that Momma had to get mad or break down and beller, so she put up a big fight.
“Oh, that’s all very well for you to say, but what it comes down to is: You’re sending me away to die like a dawg outside somewheres; you want to treat me the way they do the old rats that they give a poison to that guarantees they don’t die in the house.”
“Aw, Momma!” was all Poppa could groan. But Hattie lit into her mother with all the vigor of a true and dutiful American child.
“Why, Momma Lundy! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You must be out of your mind to talk thataway when Poppa is so nice and so worried.”
“That’s right! Pick on me!” Momma moaned, taking unfair refuge in cowardly tears. “But I notice nobody is offering to go to New York with me.”
Hattie spoke first. “I’d go in a minute if I could leave the children, but with little Eddie having his tonsils removed to-morrow and Fannie’s chicken pox just coming out—”
Poppa sighed. “I’ll go, of course, if you want me to.”
Momma saw the reluctance in his assent, and, though she knew that he had some strong business reason behind it, her cantankerous mood took umbrage at it. “What’d I tell you? Well, I will go. I’ll go all by myself, to some lonely old hotel, and if I never come back nobody will know the difference.”
“Of course you shan’t go by yourself, honey,” Poppa protested. “I was only thinkin’ that if I could go home for a while I could set my business to rights and prob’ly close up a big deal I had on when I got Hattie’s wire. If I was to put that through, it would net me a couple o’ thousand, and that would go a long ways toward paying for your operation, most likely; and then I could come on and be with you whilst you was convalescing; and then, if anything was to happen to me, the business would be all right and I’d leave you and the children fixed.”
This was the simple, humble statement of his mind in the matter; that solemn devotion to his work that makes a priestcraft and an art of business. Like all successful creators, he consecrated himself to his work and sacrificed himself to its completion. No poet or sculptor could have a holier or purer ambition for perfection and a flawless conclusion, and there was no more thought of selfishness or greed.
Momma understood and loved him, but the disease in her soul took offense at everything; and, though she realized the unselfishness of his motive, she took a perverse delight in distorting it.
Then ensued one of those duels in which each took the wrong side with a kind of devoted insincerity. Poppa frantically declared that he would go and nothing should stop him, and she as frantically declared that if he went she wouldn’t.
Momma insisted that she hadn’t a friend on earth or in New York, and she would rather go back and die in her own bed than die alone in New York.
This reminded her distraught husband that she did have a friend in New York, her old playmate, Ella Jemison, who had married Sam Killip and gone to New York and fortune.
“Oh, yes, I’m likely to ask rich folks like her to take me in!” Momma sobbed. “She wouldn’t look at me. She’s forgotten she ever knew me, though we are kind of second cousins by marriage.”
“Well, her husband hasn’t forgot he ever knew me,” Poppa snapped. “Didn’t I have a letter from him only the other day, and didn’t he say his wife asked to be kindly remembered to you?”
“Sam Killip wrote to you!” Momma cried. “How’d rich folks like him come to write to you?”
Poppa winced again at being a prophet without honor in his own home. “Oh, I guess he ain’t the only rich folks in the world. He said he saw I was a director in the Third National Bank, and he wanted to enlarge his capital, and he could offer me a chance to git in on the ground floor of a patent locomotive stoker he was pushing. He said he was a little short of cash.”
“Sam Killip short of cash!”
“Rich folks are always short of cash,” Poppa explained. “That’s why they’re rich. The minute they git any cash they put it into something and make it work. I was going to tell Sam I couldn’t see my way clear, but if Ella will look after you a little I’ll help him out.”
This put a new face on the matter. Instead of going to New York as a decrepit, friendless villager, imploring the pity of an old acquaintance, on whom her only claim was old acquaintanceship, she was offered a chance to float in on her as a bearer of rich gifts. She climbed evenly and thought of the Three Wise Men.
“I’d go there as a kind of a Mrs. Magi then?”
“Yes! Exactly! And I guess she’d treat you like a grand duchess, or something.”
“Oh, no, I don’t see how I could,” Momma sighed, slumping again, too deeply dejected to reach out and pluck the golden apple.
But Poppa had more insight than anyone suspected, and he had caught the glint of interest in Momma’s eye. It was the first sparkle he had seen there for weeks, and, though it had been quenched at once, it emboldened him to tyranny. He got to his feet and left the house with a maddening mysteriousness.
He was inspired to the amazing audacity of calling Mr. Killip on the long-distance telephone. He went to the hotel so that Momma could not interrupt him. When he had his New York victim by the ear he told him the whole story, and Killip, who was still human though a New Yorker, was as effusive in welcoming Momma as in accepting Poppa’s additional offer of money enough to stoke the stoker project to a hearty glow.
Poppa went back and told Momma what he had done, and told her to pack up. Her next obstacle was:
“But I got no clo’es here. I’ll have to go home and pack, and I just ain’t got the strength.”
“You got no clothes at home either,” Hattie put in. “You can go downtown with me and get you some decent things. You can’t go to New York looking like an old farmer.”
This was the wrong note. Momma broke her moorings again.
“I told you you was ashamed of me. I’m not fit to be seen in Terra Hut, let alone in New York. I’m simply not going to New York to make an exhabition of myself and make Ellar Killip turn up her nose at me.”
This battle had lasted only a few hours longer when a telegram arrived from Ella herself:
Overjoyed dearest Mattie to learn that you will visit New York though greatly distressed to learn of your indisposition you must come to us of course just let me know the train and I will meet you whatever the hour. I know Dr. Courtneidge very well and he is an old darling. Love to you and your husband from us both.
Ella.
The gracious warmth of this brought tears to the eyes of the poor derelict, but she masked her sniffle in a sniff.
“Where’d she learn all those swell words?”
Hattie told her mother, as usual, that she ought to be ashamed of herself, and Momma was.
She prolonged her resistance to the point where Poppa grew desperate enough to groan.
“Well, you do as you’re a mind to. Seein’ you’re strong enough to fight forever, you go home and run the business and I’ll go to the hospital my own self.”
“Run the business! That’s all you think of!” she retorted with a sublime non sequitur. “Put me on the cattle train and ship me off to the slaughter house. Ella still loves me, anyway, even if nobody else does, and she’ll see to it I get decently buried, and that’s all I got a right to expect.”
Poppa dashed out and bathed his hot head in cold water before he went to the ticket office. He nearly bit the head off the agent, just to show that he had some manhood left.
He was never quite the same man again after he got Momma on the train at last. He bade her a despondent farewell, feeling sure that he would never see her again. And, in a sense, he never did....
Going to the city for the first time in her life, especially at such a time in her life, was an adventure and a half for Momma.
In spite of the fact that she was advancing toward the knives of a surgeon who was her forlorn hope, she could not but feel a certain elation. She was experiencing what Victor Hugo called a “new shudder.”
She was almost more afraid of Ella Killip and her splendor than of the pancreatic specialist. She was fairly smothered with dread of facing the woman she had not seen since Ella was a gangling, noisy, small-town tomboy, all freckles and giggles and gawkiness.
She foresaw Ella as a sort of vast and glittering Queen Victoria, fattened on rich food and studded with jewels. She saw herself as a shabby farm wife whom Ella would probably give one glance and flee from with disdain.
When she reached New York at last, her first struggle was with a red-capped ruffian who tried to steal her valise. Her next struggle was with her terror of the meeting with Ella. If she had known how to get a train back to Carthage, she would have taken it. But the crowd hustled her up the platform and she lugged a soul heavier than her rusty hand bag.
No one had met her at the train, and she was morbid enough to hope that Ella had missed her. But inside the station she found a crowd held back by a rope, and paused to stare at the staring eyes.
She saw no one that suggested the Ella she had planned, but a tall slim creature, dressed like an actress, in glistening silk, came forward hesitantly. She looked young, and yet she didn’t. Her hair was hidden by a hat whose brim seemed to have been flourished by the impatient, whimsical stroke of a painter’s brush.
From this dressmaker’s model came a voice that startled the valise from Momma’s hand, for the voice came out of childhood, and it was the voice of Ella. It sang a new tune, but it was the old voice. It said timidly, tentatively: “Mattie? Is it you?”
Momma’s soft old knees caved in, and she sat on the valise as she whimpered: “This is me, but you’re never Ellar!”
“Oh, yes, I am, my dear,” said Ella with a good laugh as she hoisted Momma to her feet. “I’m the same old sixpence.”
“You look more like your own daughter, if you have one.”
“Oh, I have one—three, in fact. But—come along, you old dear.”
She nodded to a red cap, who took the valise and followed her as she led Momma through the station. Momma’s dazed eyes supposed they were taking a short cut through a cathedral.
The Killip limousine was marvelous, but she expected marvels. She was a trifle disappointed when she reached Ella’s home. She had expected to drive through a royal park to a palace. But she was put down at a house built jam in among a lot of other houses.
It was not half the size of Momma’s house and had no yard at all except a small patch at the back.
In place of a double row of stiff-necked butlers up a grand staircase, there was one very pleasant young man at the door and an awfully nice hired girl in cap and apron. Very friendly she was too, and helped Momma in the most folksy way up to her room.
Ella came along, and when the maid was sent for tea she petted Momma and stuffed a pillow in her back and then drew a chair close up and said: “Now, Mattie dear, tell me all about it. What on earth is the trouble, you poor soul?”
But Momma was so embarrassed by the numberless disparities between herself and this strange creature who had started life with even less advantage that she could not be at ease.
She was dazed by the brilliance of Ella, by her blithe yet haughty carriage, her young skin, slim deft hands, youthful alertness, her fashionable voice, her fashionable politeness.
She saw that Ella’s hair was white, now that her hat was off; but her hair was ironed and fluted and polished and dressed as for a fancy dress ball.
Momma summed up her bewildered homage, if it was homage, in one helpless query:
“What makes you powder your hair, Ella?”
Ella laughed aloud. A little of the old boisterousness broke through the years of control.
“As my boys would say: ‘Whaddaya mean, “powder my hair”?’ That’s my own poor old gray wool, damn it!”
Ella’s swear word even had a fashionable fillip! Momma had never sworn in her life, or, that is, hardly ever; certainly not with a smile. When she had needed profane words, she had used stupid old-womanish expletives.
But Ella’s casual objurgation broke the ice magically. There is nothing that clears the air of formality like a little damn.
Momma was so numb that it merely startled her from her torpor. She laughed the first laugh that had been shaken out of her dust bin of a soul for six weeks.
After that the two old women were themselves again, two girls who had parted and gone round the world two opposite ways and come together at last to exchange experiences. Their costumes and their dialects had changed with their travel, but their hearts were as of old.
Momma had to hear first of Ella’s amazing experiences. This desire itself was a miracle of change; she had already forgotten herself for a while.
Ella’s husband came home before Ella had finished her Arabian Nights’ Entertainment and he was pleasantly surprised and surprising. He had expected Mattie to be more ill than she was and he had not expected her to look at all like his own wife. He knew only too well how expensive Ella’s looks were and how different a life she led from the women of the old home town.
The dinner was simple but “awful tasty,” as Mattie proclaimed. She was astounded to find herself eating with relish. But the service was irresistible. The amiable gentleman who handed the plates around and took them away was so solicitous about suggesting to her the best morsels that she could not insult him by refusing anything or break his heart by leaving an untouched plate for him to carry away.
Sam Killip was eager to know about all the friends and enemies of his youth and remembered so well the people and the nooks and the scraps of those good old days that the dinner went by like a wedding feast.
Fortunately the Killip children were away at schools and house parties and Momma was not subjected to the inspection of a generation that found even Ella Killip old-fashioned and conservative. When Ella said she had given up trying to keep up with the youngsters, Momma laughed her to scorn with a quaint phrase: “Oh, yes, to hear you tell it!”
After dinner Sam had a meeting of some charitable board, and Ella and Mattie settled down for a confab. Ella neglected to mention that she had sent her opera box to friends of hers, and she made no allusion to the fact that it was the first performance of a new rôle for Caruso, and she would have given an eyetooth to hear him.
She spread Momma out on what she called a chaise longue. Momma said it was the only comfortable sofa she’d ever laid on and she was going to have one like it if it busted Poppa. Momma was already planning for the future! And thinking of it in terms of comfort!
She was reluctant to discuss her famous illness, but Ella insisted on knowing the worst.
“Well, it simply baffled all the doctors,” Momma said in a tone not altogether boastless. “I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a kind of gener’l gone-ness. I got no heart for anything—no appatite for my vittles, no int’rest in the house or church work or the heathen or the fambly. I don’t want to go to bed nights and I don’t want to get up mornings. Always been a fiend on housekeepin’, but I don’t much care now whether things are in their place or not. Dust don’t worry me like it used to. I’m all dusty myself. No special aches or pains, but I just don’t feel good anywheres.
“Want to cry all the time and I don’t know why. Hate to go outdoors and hate to stay in. Poppa drives me nearly crazy with everything he does and says, but I drive myself crazier still. I ain’t friends with myself or anybody. Want to die and can’t bear the thought of that either.
“It’s just a kind of all wrongness everywhere, if you can make anything out of that.”
To her amazement, Ella said: “I know just how you feel and you’ve come to the right place to be cured.”
It was not altogether pleasant to have Ella claim a share in Momma’s wonderful disease and to speak so off-handedly of its cure. But instead of rebuking Ella for presuming and for minimizing the crisis, Momma felt relieved and before long she was yawning nobly and confessing that she could not keep her eyes open. Ella went to her room with her and saw her bestowed, then kissed her good night and left her. Momma noted that her valise had been unpacked, her bed opened, her nightgown and slippers laid out, a water bottle set by the reading lamp on a little table by the bedhead, and a dozen little thoughtfulnesses executed in her behalf.
When she was in her old nightgown, which was modeled on the potato-bag pattern, and had said her prayers, she crept into the disgracefully fine linen sheets and slept in luxurious oblivion for nine good hours.
She did not know that Ella had sneaked into her own room, dressed swiftly, and stolen out to the opera, where she stood up, and that she went to a supper and there danced a while before she sneaked home.
Momma had her breakfast in bed at Ella’s previous order and wandered about the house for hours before Ella had rung for her breakfast and sent for Momma.
Ella was a sight. She looked like one of those immor’l French kings’ favorites. She had on a lace boudoir cap and a silk nightgown, very deckolett, and a “breakfast jacket” (of all things!) of satin and lace.
She did look handsome. Momma had always hated to have even Poppa see her before breakfast. She began to be a little eager for her cure.
“When do I go to see this Dr. Courtneidge?”
Ella hesitated a moment, then spoke with a certain sternness:
“There are two or three things that have to be done first, Mattie dear. I’m always a beast up till noon, so you mustn’t be surprised if I’m brutally frank now. Dr. Courtneidge is a very fussy and snappy old gentleman. He has only swells for patients and he’s very particular.”
“Don’t he treat poor folks at tall?” Momma gasped.
“Oh, yes, he has free clinics and hospitals and all that and does half his work for nothing. That’s why he’s so particular with his pay patients. You’ve got to go through a course of sprouts and buy some things or you’ll never get near him.
“His reception room is full of people, and you’d feel terribly embarrassed to wait there till he gets round. So you really must have some of this year’s clothes and a 1920 hat. And your hair—you mustn’t be offended, Mattie, dear, but really your hair and your skin! He’d give you one glance and send you away without an examination even. You see, I know him.
“And then the examination, Mattie dear—well, you know what that’s like. And in the hospital—well! I saw the nightgown laid out on your pillow and that sort of thing would simply frighten the doctor to death. He really couldn’t operate.”
“I’m not looking to marry the old fool,” Momma mumbled. “I got one husband a’ready.”
“I know, my dear Mattie, but your one husband put you in my charge and I’m going to see you through. My masseuse is coming to my house this morning. She’s downstairs now, I imagine, and I’m going to have her begin on you. When she’s finished, my hairdresser, François, will get to work on that dear old poll of yours and take off about forty years of age. Then we’ll have lunch and go shopping.”
Momma was choked with wrath, but Ella would neither fight nor plead. She just bullied her with laughter, and Momma, feeling like a convict unjustly imprisoned, set her jaws and resolved to go through with the sentence. She revolted, however, at the insolence of the masseuse—and her exclamations of horror at the neglect of a “skin that had never really been cleaned.”
But the wretch silenced Momma’s indignation with the indignity of smeared cold cream, and smothered her with hot towels and cold towels, and with lotions of every odor and smart.
Momma would not speak to her as she left, but when she scowled at the mirror, she gazed at the new face aghast it flung back at her. The dull parchment of her skin had become a living integument with a kind of dreamy radiance alive in it.
Momma felt bewitched. She would have sworn that the image in the looking-glass smiled first at her and nodded, compelling her to smile back and nod in return. She hung there fascinated, understanding a little of what Narcissus felt when he looked first in the pool.
Then a quiet Frenchman was shown in. He overawed Momma by his dignity and his dexterity. She dared not slap his face when he spoke of her hair as a crime. He called it a “cream,” but she understood his shoulders.
And then he attacked her poor head with ferocious familiarity. If Poppa had ever caught him, and her, he’d certainly have shot them both.
Momma was in for it, however, and she actually permitted this strange man, this appalling foreigner, to take down her hair, drench it, soap it, souse her head in water, pour curious smelly things over her scalp, and rinse them out, massage her occiput, comb and pull and torture and iron her hair and dress it on top of her astounded skull in what he called a “French twist.” She spent a whole hour of “feeling like a shirt in a steam laundry,” as she afterward expressed it. Then he brandished before her a mirror and uttered a triumphant cry of something that sounded like:
“Ah, my damn, walla, walla!”
Momma blushed vermilion and felt as immoral as she looked. Yet not at all remorseful, somehow. Fortunately Franswa dashed out to prepare the hair of Ella, leaving Momma to ponder her new face and her new hair with a new soul.
She felt that, in Hattie’s formula, she ought to be ashamed of herself, but, to save her immortal being, she could not.
Only one thing she was sure of, and that was that that head and that hair did not belong on top of that old dress of hers. Her one “best dress” was the one worst dress she had ever seen.
When at length she saw Ella, Ella screamed with delight at the transformation and said something that rimed:
Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be.
The afternoon was spent in shopping for what Ella called “landjerree.”
Until she had the proper underpinnings, Ella simply refused to buy Mattie the new dress and hat she was already clamoring for.
The amount of Poppa’s money that Ella spent on silken shamelessness dazed Momma, but Ella would not be checked, and Momma was too childishly interested in the new doll rags to make more than a show of resistance.
Ella said: “If your husband has money enough to waste ten thousand dollars on my husband’s foolish investments, he has money enough to buy you some decent underclothes.”
“Did you say ‘decent’?” was Momma’s feeble disclaimer, but she barely muttered it.
That night, on a plea of going to bed early, Momma locked herself in her room and tried on the new things. She nearly died of palpitation of the heart when she stood up in silk stockings, satin mules, and in a new streamline corset that gave her a figure! A heroic figure indeed, but a shape, a contour, that was not altogether an insult to the Creator who fashioned it. Momma had to give it a religious significance to live through it.
And why not? What instinct is more deeply implanted in womanhood than the immemorial insatiable lust for pretty things? It has resisted the immemorial insatiable lust of preachers and satirists for insulting it, of economists and hardworking men for denouncing it. It has been called every contemptuous and cruel name in every language. Laws have been made against it innumerably, in vain. And it has flourished as unconquerably as violets in moss, as perfume in hyacinths, as bright plumage in birds, and ornate sunsets in western skies.
The weavers of silk and the needlers of laces, the designers of gowns and of hats have kept up their beautiful careers despite the thunders of self-styled virtue and the slanders of all times.
Poets and prosers and painters who have turned less beautiful lines and have married less beautiful colors, and the critics who have celebrated their achievements, have looked down with disdain on those who have devoted their inspirations and their toil to the creation of felicitous decorations for the living body.
But the women have known better. They never have despised the artists who improved them and enhanced them; and by hook or by crook they have kept those artists alive and blessed them with fame.
And again why not? The pietists and the Puritans who cannot forgive women for trying to be beautiful, do they not belie their own gods in their own barbaric praise of ugliness?
“O Justice, what crimes are committed in thy name!” And, O Beauty, what crimes in thine! Yet beauty shall not die nor the love of ornament, and those who hate them cannot prove their right to cast a stone. Frightful extravagances and cruelties are the result of the hunger for beauty and the feeding of that appetite, but this is true of every other religion and law and ideal.
If everybody who dressed plainly and lived without luxury, gave all he saved or she did not spend to the poor, their miserliness might be justified, but everybody knows that this is not so.
Beauty is generous. She who is pleased with herself is already hospitable, and until the millennium is here those who have not the energy or the wile to get fine clothes and wear them well may content themselves as best they can by watching the well-bedecked go by.
And who is he so mean of soul that he would decree the extinction of the custom women have of making themselves as pleasing to the eye as possible? And what benefits would the vandal confer on bedulled mankind?
Momma at least at last was not of that humor. She had become a girl again at heart. She could never be again the gracile nymph who had turned the heads of Carthage swains with her flesh of apple-blossom hue, her fleecy hair in its ribbons, and her gay body in its winsome fabrics.
But she could be a splendid white-haired matron; and that age has a nobler beauty and a grander charm than even youth can give, youth so common and so helpless in its grace.
When Momma walked by chance in front of the long cheval glass, she fell back with a sob of fear and shame. But she approached again and studied herself. She stood up straight, lifting her head proudly on her throat, her torso on her hips; holding herself stalwart as an empress.
And she thanked God for what He had given her, and promised Him she would take better care of the chalice of her soul. And a happiness possessed her like a benediction.
The next day she went forth to buy dresses, not mere tents to hide her shapeless body under, colored bags to cover her lumps and bulges from the casual and unlingering eye, but exquisite masterpieces from skilled looms, piously accepting the human form and developing its graces.
Ella was not fool enough to put kittenish anachronisms of dress on Momma. She made her look herself at her supreme.
And the slithy mannequins who stood about raved over the miracle that had been accomplished in turning the dowdy peasant that entered the shop into a high-bred dowager who smiled upon an approving mirror.
Momma’s only grief was that she could not wear any of the gowns out on the street at once. She had a frantic desire to prance up Fifth Avenue without delay. But there were alterations to make, and she must wait.
And so must Dr. Courtneidge.
She took the delay as her punishment for having put off so long the day of her at-one-ment with her better self.
The afternoon was spent among the milliners. Glistening countesses in black satin came and went with hats like coronets. They set them daintily on Momma’s turreted hair and lifted them away again. Momma sat up so straight that she felt taller sitting down than she had seemed hitherto reaching for a pantry shelf.
It was unbelievable how much it changed her face to change her hat. She cowered in horror from beneath some of the brims, but others so caught her up into the clouds that they amounted to translation—apotheosis almost.
In spite of Ella’s cries of protest, she bought five of the costliest and wore one of them away.
She went to bed prostrated. But it was the prostration of a girl come home from a great ball, worn out with rapture and pursued by remembered music.
Poppa had not heard a word of Momma since the telegram she sent him saying that she had arrived and been met and was awful tired and discouraged.
When no letters came he was sure that she was up to her old trick of concealing the worst from him as long as possible. He was sure that she was in the hospital, delirious with pain and on her way to the grave. His heart went mad with visions of her loss and of the dismal life without her.
On another of his impulses he took a train for New York, sending a brief telegram to Ella.
He got off the train in much the desolate mood that had dejected Momma when she arrived. He also resisted the redcap and trudged dolefully to the line where people waited behind the rope. And up to him also came a gorgeous creature whom he did not recognize until he heard the ancient voice.
“Poppa, don’t you know me?”
The voice was Momma’s, but since when was she a tsarina off the throne? He, too, dropped his handbag and collapsed. And she lifted him and murmured as she kissed him:
“Don’t you like me?”
“I don’t know you,” he faltered.
But he kissed her suave and fragrant cheek again and looked into the gleaming eyes of the bride he remembered out of the long ago.
Then he began to laugh in great gulps of blissful anguish, like a boy who has found on the Christmas tree a richer gift than he had ever dreamed of, or dared to ask.
Momma cried too. But such a different wail from the wails he had heard from her of late!
Finally Poppa thought that he must give credit for the redemption where it was due.
“That Dr. Courtneidge is certainly a wonder. What on earth did he do to you?”
“I haven’t seen him yet,” said Momma. “And I’m not goin’ to. I’ve taken what Ella calls the ‘hat cure’ and all the other clothes cures. And they haven’t cost much more than old Courtneidge would have charged.”
Poppa felt very uneasy walking along with Momma in all her glittering glory. He had always loved her. Now he felt proud of her with the goodly pride of a man who has the luck to get a beautiful wife and the brains to keep her beautiful.
The only fly in the great bowl of ointment was himself, his shabby self. He confessed as much.
“I’m ashamed to be seen with you, Momma.”
“You won’t be after I get through taking you to the tailor’s and the other places I’m goin’ to take you to. This is our second honeymoon, Poppa. We didn’t have any trousseau at tall before, but we’re going to make up for it now. I think I’ll telegraph for Hattie and give her a look, just so’s to hear her say: ‘Why, Momma, you ought to be ashamed of yourself!’”
“I guess you’d oughta, at that,” Poppa guffawed.
And as she swept into Ella’s limousine like a Roman empress entering a chariot. Momma tittered:
“I am! I’m so ashamed of myself, I’m proud of it!”
Cosmopolitan Magazine