The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

always came from Henrietta’s room, a combination of dust, powder, scent, body odors that stirred the children’s blood, deep, deep. It had as much attraction for them as Sam’s jolly singing, and when they were allowed to, they gathered in Henrietta’s room, making hay, dashing to the kitchen to get things for her, asking her if she wanted her knitting, her book, tumbling out into the hall and back, until it was as if she had twenty children, their different voices steaming, bubbling, and popping, like an irrepressible but inoffensive crater. Henrietta would not have them on the bed with her, though. She sat there by herself, in the center, propped on two or three pillows, in an old dressing gown, with her glasses on and her gray-speckled black hair drawn tightly back in a braid. Beside her would be some darning, or a library book sprawling halfway down the bed where she had thrown it in disgust, with a “Such rot!”
    But she sometimes let them snuggle into the shawls, old gowns, dirty clothes ready for the wash, and blankets thrown over her great easy chair, hold their small parliament on the flowered green carpet, or look at all the things in her dressing table, and in what they called her treasure drawers. All Henny’s drawers were treasure drawers. In them were spilled and tossed all sorts of laces, ribbons, gloves, flowers, jabots, belts, and collars, hairpins, powders, buttons, imitation jewels, shoelaces, and—wonder of wonders!—little pots of rouge, bits of mascara, anathema to Sam, but to them a joyous mystery. Often, as a treat, the children were allowed to look in the drawers and then would plunge their hands into this mess of textures and surfaces, with sparkling eyes and rapt faces, feeling, guessing, until their fingers struck something they did not recognize, when their faces would grow serious, surprised, and they would start pulling, until a whole bundle of oddments lay on the floor and their mother would cry,
    “Oh, you pest!”
    There were excitement, fun, joy, and even enchantment with both mother and father, and it was just a question of whether one wanted to sing, gallop about, and put on a performance (“showing off like all Pollitry,” said Henny), or look for mysteries (“Henny’s room is a chaos,” said Sam). A child could question both father and mother and get answers: but Sam’s answers were always to the point, full of facts; while the more one heard of Henny’s answer, the more intriguing it was, the less was understood. Beyond Sam stood the physical world, and beyond Henny—what? A great mystery. There was even a difference in the rooms. Everyone knew everything that was in Sam’s rooms, even where the life-insurance policy and the bankbook were, but no one (and least of all Sam, that know-all and see-all) knew for certain what was in even one of Henrietta’s closets and tables. Their mother had locked cabinets with medicines and poisons, locked drawers with letters and ancient coins from Calabria and the south of France, a jewel case, and so on. The children could only fossick in them at intervals, and Sam was not even allowed into the room. Thus Henny had at times, even to Louie, the air of a refuge of delight, a cave of Aladdin, while Sam was more like a museum. Henrietta screamed and Samuel scolded: Henny daily revealed the hypocrisy of Sam, and Sam found it his painful duty to say that Henny was a born liar. Each of them struggled to keep the children, not to deliver them into the hands of the enemy: but the children were not taking it in at all. Their real feelings were made up of the sensations received in the respective singsongs and treasure hunts.
    Louisa was Henny’s stepchild, as everyone knew, and no one, least of all Louie, expected Henny to love this girl as she loved her own. But though Henny’s charms had perceptibly diminished, Henny’s treasures, physical and mental, the sensual, familiar house life she led, her kindness in sickness, her queer tags of