folklore, boarding-school graces, and femininity had gained on Louie. Uncritical and without knowledge of other women, or of mother’s love, she was able to like Henny’s airs, the messes of her linen and clothes closets, her castoff hats and shoes, the strange beautiful things she got secondhand from rich cousins, her gifts, charities, and the fine lies to ladies come to afternoon tea. As for affection, Louie did not miss what she had never known. Henny, delicate and anemic, really disliked the powerful, clumsy, healthy child, and avoided contact with her as much as she could. It happened that this solitude was exactly what Louie most craved. Like all children she expected intrusion and impertinence: she very early became grateful to her stepmother for the occasions when Henny most markedly neglected her, refused to instruct her, refused to interpret her to visitors.
Henny, in the clouded perspectives of Louie’s childish memory, had once been a beautiful, dark, thin young lady in a ruffled silk dressing gown, mother of a very large red infant in a ruffled bassinet, receiving in state a company of very beautiful young ladies, all in their best dresses. After this particular day, Louie’s memory was blacked out, and only awoke some years later to another Henny. The dark lady of the ruffles had disappeared and in her place was a grubby, angry Henny, who, after screeching, and crying at them all, would fall in a faint on the floor. At first, Sam would run to get cushions; later, when they reached the epoch where Sam habitually said, “Don’t take any notice, Looloo, she is foxing!” Louie still ran for the cushions, and would puff and struggle over the deathlike face, drawn and yellow under its full black hair; and would run to the kitchen to ask Hazel, the thin, bitter maid, for Henny’s tea. When quite small, she had been trusted to go to the forbidden medicine chest, to get out Henny’s medicine—phenacetin, aspirin, or the tabu pyramidon—or her smelling salts; and even once had brought the bottle of spirits hidden behind all those bottles at the back, which all the children knew was there, and which none of them would ever have revealed to their father. None of them thought there was cheating in this: their father was the tables of the law, but their mother was natural law; Sam was household czar by divine right, but Henny was the czar’s everlasting adversary, household anarchist by divine right.
But here came Louie observing them both fitfully and with difficulty, since her last birthday. There did not seem to be any secrets in her parents’ life. Henny was very free of comments on her husband, and Sam, in season, took each of his children aside, but most particularly the eldest, and told, in simple language, the true story of his disillusionment. In this light, Louie and clever Ernie, who observed and held his tongue, saw, in a strange Punch-and-Judy show, unrecognizable Sams and Hennys moving in a closet of time, with a little flapping curtain, up and down.
“The night of our marriage I knew I was doomed to unhappiness!”
“I never wanted to marry him: he went down on his knees!”
“She lied to me within three days of marriage!”
“The first week I wanted to go back home!”
“Oh, Louie, the hell, where there should have been heaven!”
“But he stuck me with his brats, to make sure I didn’t get away from him.”
The children tried to make head or tail of these fatal significant sentences, formed in the crucible of the dead past, and now come down on their heads, heavy, cold, dull. Why were these texts hurled at them from their parents’ Olympus: Louie tried to piece the thing together; Ernie concluded that adults were irrational.
On her eleventh birthday in February, Henny had given Louisa the old silver mesh bag that her stepdaughter had desired for years. Love and gratitude welled up in Louie; the more so that Sam made an especially poor showing on the same occasion, giving an
Henny, in the clouded perspectives of Louie’s childish memory, had once been a beautiful, dark, thin young lady in a ruffled silk dressing gown, mother of a very large red infant in a ruffled bassinet, receiving in state a company of very beautiful young ladies, all in their best dresses. After this particular day, Louie’s memory was blacked out, and only awoke some years later to another Henny. The dark lady of the ruffles had disappeared and in her place was a grubby, angry Henny, who, after screeching, and crying at them all, would fall in a faint on the floor. At first, Sam would run to get cushions; later, when they reached the epoch where Sam habitually said, “Don’t take any notice, Looloo, she is foxing!” Louie still ran for the cushions, and would puff and struggle over the deathlike face, drawn and yellow under its full black hair; and would run to the kitchen to ask Hazel, the thin, bitter maid, for Henny’s tea. When quite small, she had been trusted to go to the forbidden medicine chest, to get out Henny’s medicine—phenacetin, aspirin, or the tabu pyramidon—or her smelling salts; and even once had brought the bottle of spirits hidden behind all those bottles at the back, which all the children knew was there, and which none of them would ever have revealed to their father. None of them thought there was cheating in this: their father was the tables of the law, but their mother was natural law; Sam was household czar by divine right, but Henny was the czar’s everlasting adversary, household anarchist by divine right.
But here came Louie observing them both fitfully and with difficulty, since her last birthday. There did not seem to be any secrets in her parents’ life. Henny was very free of comments on her husband, and Sam, in season, took each of his children aside, but most particularly the eldest, and told, in simple language, the true story of his disillusionment. In this light, Louie and clever Ernie, who observed and held his tongue, saw, in a strange Punch-and-Judy show, unrecognizable Sams and Hennys moving in a closet of time, with a little flapping curtain, up and down.
“The night of our marriage I knew I was doomed to unhappiness!”
“I never wanted to marry him: he went down on his knees!”
“She lied to me within three days of marriage!”
“The first week I wanted to go back home!”
“Oh, Louie, the hell, where there should have been heaven!”
“But he stuck me with his brats, to make sure I didn’t get away from him.”
The children tried to make head or tail of these fatal significant sentences, formed in the crucible of the dead past, and now come down on their heads, heavy, cold, dull. Why were these texts hurled at them from their parents’ Olympus: Louie tried to piece the thing together; Ernie concluded that adults were irrational.
On her eleventh birthday in February, Henny had given Louisa the old silver mesh bag that her stepdaughter had desired for years. Love and gratitude welled up in Louie; the more so that Sam made an especially poor showing on the same occasion, giving an
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