Babbit (32 page)

  I

  
T
HOUGH he saw
them twice daily, though he knew and amply discussed every detail
of their expenditures, yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more
conscious of his children than of the buttons on his
coat-sleeves.

  The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of
Verona.

  She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the
Gruensberg Leather Company; she did her work with the thoroughness
of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them;
but she was one of the people who give an agitating impression of
being on the point of doing something desperate - of leaving a job
or a husband - without ever doing it. Babbitt was so hopeful about
Escott's hesitant ardors that he became the playful parent. When he
returned from the Elks he peered coyly into the living-room and
gurgled, "Has our Kenny been here to-night?" He never credited
Verona's protest, "Why, Ken and I are just good friends, and we
only talk about Ideas. I won't have all this sentimental nonsense,
that would spoil everything."

  It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.

  With conditions in Latin and English but with a
triumphant record in manual training, basket-ball, and the
organization of dances, Ted was struggling through his Senior year
in the East Side High School. At home he was interested only when
he was asked to trace some subtle ill in the ignition system of the
car. He repeated to his tut-tutting father that he did not wish to
go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally disturbed by
this "shiftlessness" and by Ted's relations with Eunice
Littlefield, next door.

  Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield,
that wrought-iron fact-mill, that horse-faced priest of private
ownership, Eunice was a midge in the sun. She danced into the
house, she flung herself into Babbitt's lap when he was reading,
she crumpled his paper, and laughed at him when he adequately
explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper as he hated a broken
sales-contract. She was seventeen now. Her ambition was to be a
cinema actress. She did not merely attend the showing of every
"feature film;" she also read the motion-picture magazines, those
extraordinary symptoms of the Age of Pep-monthlies and weeklies
gorgeously illustrated with portraits of young women who had
recently been manicure girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and
who, unless their every grimace had been arranged by a director,
could not have acted in the Easter cantata of the Central Methodist
Church; magazines reporting, quite seriously, in "interviews"
plastered with pictures of riding-breeches and California
bungalows, the views on sculpture and international politics of
blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful young men; outlining the
plots of films about pure prostitutes and kind-hearted
train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks into
Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.

  These authorities Eunice studied. She could, she
frequently did, tell whether it was in November or December, 1905,
that Mack Harker? the renowned screen cowpuncher and badman, began
his public career. as chorus man in "Oh, You Naughty Girlie." On
the wall of her room, her father reported, she had pinned up
twenty-one photographs of actors. But the signed portrait of the
most graceful of the movie heroes she carried in her young
bosom.

  Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods,
and he suspected that Eunice smoked cigarettes. He smelled the
cloying reek from up-stairs, and heard her giggling with Ted. He
never inquired. The agreeable child dismayed him. Her thin and
charming face was sharpened by bobbed hair; her skirts were short,
her stockings were rolled, and, as she flew after Ted, above the
caressing silk were glimpses of soft knees which made Babbitt
uneasy, and wretched that she should consider him old. Sometimes,
in the veiled life of his dreams, when the fairy child came running
to him she took on the semblance of Eunice Littlefield.

  Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.

  A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his
teasing for a car of his own. However lax he might be about early
rising and the prosody of Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering.
With three other boys he bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an
amazing racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round corners
in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit. Babbitt gave him a
motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon, with seven sandwiches
and a bottle of Coca-Cola in his pockets, and Eunice perched eerily
on the rumble seat, he went roaring off to distant towns.

  Usually Eunice and he were merely neighborhood
chums, and quarreled with a wholesome and violent lack of delicacy;
but now and then, after the color and scent of a dance, they were
silent together and a little furtive, and Babbitt was worried.

  Babbitt was an average father. He was affectionate,
bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most
parents, he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly
wrong, then virtuously pouncing. He justified himself by croaking,
"Well, Ted's mother spoils him. Got to be somebody who tells him
what's what, and me, I'm elected the goat. Because I try to bring
him up to be a real, decent, human being and not one of these
sapheads and lounge-lizards, of course they all call me a
grouch!"

  Throughout, with the eternal human genius for
arriving by the worst possible routes at surprisingly tolerable
goals, Babbitt loved his son and warmed to his companionship and
would have sacrificed everything for him - if he could have been
sure of proper credit.

  II

  Ted was planning a party for his set in the Senior
Class.

  Babbitt meant to be helpful and jolly about it. From
his memory of high-school pleasures back in Catawba he suggested
the nicest games: Going to Boston, and charades with stew-pans for
helmets, and word-games in which you were an Adjective or a
Quality. When he was most enthusiastic he discovered that they
weren't paying attention; they were only tolerating him. As for the
party, it was as fixed and standardized as a Union Club Hop. There
was to be dancing in the living-room, a noble collation in the
dining-room, and in the hall two tables of bridge for what Ted
called "the poor old dumb-bells that you can't get to dance hardly
more 'n half the time."

  Every breakfast was monopolized by conferences on
the affair. No one listened to Babbitt's bulletins about the
February weather or to his throat-clearing comments on the
headlines. He said furiously, "If I may be PERMITTED to interrupt
your engrossing private CONVERSATION - Juh hear what I SAID?"

  "Oh, don't be a spoiled baby! Ted and I have just as
much right to talk as you have!" flared Mrs. Babbitt.

  On the night of the party he was permitted to look
on, when he was not helping Matilda with the Vecchia ice cream and
the petits fours. He was deeply disquieted. Eight years ago, when
Verona had given a high-school party, the children had been
featureless gabies. Now they were men and women of the world, very
supercilious men and women; the boys condescended to Babbitt, they
wore evening-clothes, and with hauteur they accepted cigarettes
from silver cases. Babbitt had heard stories of what the Athletic
Club called "goings on" at young parties; of girls "parking" their
corsets in the dressing-room, of "cuddling" and "petting," and a
presumable increase in what was known as Immorality. To-night he
believed the stories. These children seemed bold to him, and cold.
The girls wore misty chiffon, coral velvet, or cloth of gold, and
around their dipping bobbed hair were shining wreaths. He had it,
upon urgent and secret inquiry, that no corsets were known to be
parked upstairs; but certainly these eager bodies were not stiff
with steel. Their stockings were of lustrous silk, their slippers
costly and unnatural, their lips carmined and their eyebrows
penciled. They danced cheek to cheek with the boys, and Babbitt
sickened with apprehension and unconscious envy.

  Worst of them all was Eunice Littlefield, and
maddest of all the boys was Ted. Eunice was a flying demon. She
slid the length of the room; her tender shoulders swayed; her feet
were deft as a weaver's shuttle; she laughed, and enticed Babbitt
to dance with her.

  Then he discovered the annex to the party.

  The boys and girls disappeared occasionally, and he
remembered rumors of their drinking together from hip-pocket
flasks. He tiptoed round the house, and in each of the dozen cars
waiting in the street he saw the points of light from cigarettes,
from each of them heard high giggles. He wanted to denounce them
but (standing in the snow, peering round the dark corner) he did
not dare. He tried to be tactful. When he had returned to the front
hall he coaxed the boys, "Say, if any of you fellows are thirsty,
there's some dandy ginger ale."

  "Oh! Thanks!" they condescended.

  He sought his wife, in the pantry, and exploded,
"I'd like to go in there and throw some of those young pups out of
the house! They talk down to me like I was the butler! I'd like to
- "

  "I know," she sighed; "only everybody says, all the
mothers tell me, unless you stand for them, if you get angry
because they go out to their cars to have a drink, they won't come
to your house any more, and we wouldn't want Ted left out of
things, would we?"

  He announced that he would be enchanted to have Ted
left out of things, and hurried in to be polite, lest Ted be left
out of things.

  But, he resolved, if he found that the boys were
drinking, he would - well, he'd "hand 'em something that would
surprise 'em." While he was trying to be agreeable to
large-shouldered young bullies he was earnestly sniffing at them
Twice he caught the reek of prohibition-time whisky, but then, it
was only twice -

  Dr. Howard Littlefield lumbered in.

  He had come, in a mood of solemn parental patronage,
to look on. Ted and Eunice were dancing, moving together like one
body. Littlefield gasped. He called Eunice. There was a whispered
duologue, and Littlefield explained to Babbitt that Eunice's mother
had a headache and needed her. She went off in tears. Babbitt
looked after them furiously. "That little devil! Getting Ted into
trouble! And Littlefield, the conceited old gas-bag, acting like it
was Ted that was the bad influence!"

  Later he smelled whisky on Ted's breath.

  After the civil farewell to the guests, the row was
terrific, a thorough Family Scene, like an avalanche, devastating
and without reticences. Babbitt thundered, Mrs. Babbitt wept, Ted
was unconvincingly defiant, and Verona in confusion as to whose
side she was taking.

  For several months there was coolness between the
Babbitts and the Littlefields, each family sheltering their lamb
from the wolf-cub next door. Babbitt and Littlefield still spoke in
pontifical periods about motors and the senate, but they kept
bleakly away from mention of their families. Whenever Eunice came
to the house she discussed with pleasant intimacy the fact that she
had been forbidden to come to the house; and Babbitt tried, with no
success whatever, to be fatherly and advisory with her.

  III

  "Gosh all fishhooks!" Ted wailed to Eunice, as they
wolfed hot chocolate, lumps of nougat, and an assortment of glace
nuts, in the mosaic splendor of the Royal Drug Store, "it gets me
why Dad doesn't just pass out from being so poky. Every evening he
sits there, about half-asleep, and if Rone or I say, 'Oh, come on,
let's do something,' he doesn't even take the trouble to think
about it. He just yawns and says, 'Naw, this suits me right here.'
He doesn't know there's any fun going on anywhere. I suppose he
must do some thinking, same as you and I do, but gosh, there's no
way of telling it. I don't believe that outside of the office and
playing a little bum golf on Saturday he knows there's anything in
the world to do except just keep sitting there-sitting there every
night - not wanting to go anywhere - not wanting to do anything -
thinking us kids are crazy - sitting there - Lord!"