Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 604
The Fighting Littles (1941)
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
To All the Nieces
Florence, Margaret, Josephine, Patty, Susanah, Mig,
and the Divine Flora
From
A Completely Admiring Uncle
I
JUNE MORNING SUNSHINE brightening hotly on the lowered window shades of Mrs. Little’s bedroom woke her from a dream that she was still beautiful Wilma Filmer, unmarried and being chased by a Russian choir. For some moments after her waking, which was at first only partial, she remained in fear of the choir; then, becoming slightly more intelligent, comprehended that she was afraid of something else but couldn’t remember what it was. She didn’t wish to remember, either. Apprehension lay upon her shapelessly; but she preferred not to investigate it and tried to get back to sleep again, no matter came what dreams. Recollections wouldn’t let her, began to form themselves, and she was aware that she feared something old and something new. Something that had been happening for a long while frightened her and so did something recent — so recent that it had taken place during the past night. “Oh, my!” she said aloud, remembering everything, and decided not to get up until her husband had gone downtown to business, if he’d let her.
The something old that frightened her — the something that had been happening for a long time — was the change in what she thought of as her husband’s disposition. During their engagement and for a long time after they were married nobody could have been more amiably tractable. He sought no pleasure without her, except to attend a Legion meeting now and then, or a banquet of his college fraternity alumni; and, generous, he was delighted when she confessed to him that she’d spent a little more on a dress, a pair of slippers or a hat than she thought she ought. Sturdy and energetic in body and mind, he loved his country, his wife, baseball and pounding hard at his business. They were happy in the six-room house where they lived those first years, half way to downtown in their growing city; it wasn’t until after the birth of the baby that he showed a first symptom of what later got to be the matter with him.
“Put her back in the crib instantly!” he said crisply to his wife, one day. “I don’t intend to have my child picked up and held in that posture; it’s not hygiene.”
He’d read all the books, and his wife hadn’t read any; books made her sleepy. So she gave way and put the baby back in the crib. Several times Ripley Little was like this; but evoked from the young wife more amusement than alarm. In fact, she was pleased by the scientific raising he insisted upon for their little girl.
Affection made him perhaps an overdutiful father, and he was only a little less so when the second child, a boy, was born three years and a few months later; but in general the young husband’s amiability, often fondly indulgent, continued, and so did the cheerfulness of the small household. There couldn’t easily have been a jollier family when the children were little. Christmases and birthdays were merry festivals, and in the summertime Ripley Little had a hundred devices for making gay — afternoons at the ball park, picnics in a dozen sylvan spots known to him since boyhood, evening dashes in the car for sundaes downtown at the fashionable confectioner’s, spending debauches at Schücke’s voluptuous toy store, movies, the circus — there was no end to the surprises he had for the children.
He loved to play with them and their toys, and, when they grew old enough for school, he went over their lessons with them, chucklingly solved their problems in arithmetic, freshened his memory to talk history with them, and obviously asked no better of life than to continue these pleasures. He didn’t even play golf, declaring that he had too much fun at home with “the little Little family.” In those days he loved to speak of his wife, his children and himself as “the little Little family”, and he often repeated wistfully his great wish — that his children would never grow older.
He was a born businessman, and, profoundly inspired by the thought that he worked for his children’s future, he strove mightily and successfully, was happy in his daily tasks, prospered rapidly. Goody, the little girl, was six years old and Filmer, the boy, just under three in 1929 when their father bought the fine new house, with the shrubberied big yard for them to play in, far out in a semi-suburban affluent neighborhood. The stock market collapse of that year didn’t hurt Ripley Little much — he’d anticipated it — and he stood up to the declines of ‘31 and ‘32 manfully; it wasn’t till after the banks had been closed in ‘33 that his confident cheerfulness was really impaired. His wife, never much aware of economics or of public affairs, perceived that he began to have a habit of looking uneasy and to be sometimes irritable in his speech. He was still jolly with the children but inclined to be stricter with them.
This strictness, or at least the attempt to enforce it, increased. He’d been brought up — or now believed he had — to respect his elders, to cultivate quiet and rather formal manners, to reverence religious observances, to possess a feeling of responsibility and to be generally sensible. As his children grew old enough to be supposed to understand these things, he naturally expected their deportment to show that they did, and, more and more worried about his country and his business, he became more fretful when it didn’t.
Especially was he sharp sometimes with his daughter; for the young Goody, resembling her mother, who was still a noticeably pretty woman, seemed to be growing up lightheaded, particularly when she came to be fourteen and fifteen and sixteen. As these ages coincided with unpleasant perturbations brought upon Ripley Little by both private and public affairs, he was the more frequently temperish, while Goody, proportionately high-spirited as she grew prettier and prettier, replied in kind. To Mrs. Little her own position daily seemed to be the unfortunate one of an umpire present upon a field of continuous contest — an umpire often appealed to but without the power to enforce her decisions or, indeed, many opportunities to announce them.
She was a peace-loving woman; but not an able one. She’d never known how to cope with what she called “the servant problem”, and her vigorous husband had done most of the housekeeping before Cousin Olita came to live with the family. Cousin Olita, born Filmer (not Little) was peace-loving too; but she had a gift, her only one, for making household service smooth. In her youth Cousin Olita had been thought quite a showpiece in a large curvy way, though nobody young would have believed this of her now, and she was still as pleasant looking as she was overbuxom, frizzly-blonded and good-natured. Flat broke at forty-five, she’d flopped upon the Littles, who kept her because somebody had to; but her sunniness and her talent with servants and for marketing were at least partly worth the added expense. Mrs. Little thought that they all might be having a pretty nice time together — she and Ripley and Goody and young Filmer and Cousin Olita — if her husband could ever just forget the New Deal and stop fighting with Goody, anyhow now and then.
He didn’t seem able to do either, though he had a wild week of excitement and triumph in the early summer of 1940 when the Republicans nominated Mr. Wendell L. Willkie for President. Ripley Little went so passionately into the campaign that his troubles with the seventeen-year-old Goody were minor until after the election in November, which prostrated him. Recovering partially, he renewed his struggle to form his daughter upon old precepts and was so vehement in the matter that Mrs. Little feared there’d never be peace in the house again.
She reproached herself for her total failure as a reconciliator. Not perceiving that she was merely a buffer in a war between two generations and two nervous nervous systems, she was sure that there was some road to harmony if she could only find it. Advised by a friend, she privately consulted a psychiatrist who, himself confused by her account of her troubles, got her all mixed up and frightened. She began by trying hard to tell him about her husband’s peculiar system of profanity, how what he said sounded terribly like swearing yet really wasn’t.
The truth of the matter, simpler than she realized, was only that Ripley Little sometimes yielded to the ancient urge of many good men to be profane yet not irreverent and to blaspheme without sin. Archaic forms, such as Od’s wounds, Od’s fish, ‘Sblood, Gadzooks, would have been ridiculous in the modern mouth, and the later Jiminy criminy, Jiminy crickets, Gee, Gosh, Golly, Jeepers creepers, or the New England My Godfrey, My Odfrey, and By Orry, these and their like would have been pale upon the tongue of a man so forcible. Ripley Little’s style in all of his acts was the natural, so his style in swearing sprang naturally to his lips, although, as his wife said, it sounded dismayingly like the real thing. Mrs. Little’s powers of narration, however, were feeble and she didn’t make herself entirely clear.
“You see, he says something like jobjam, for instance,” she told the psychiatrist. “Sometimes I think he’s saying what it sounds like, or even worse; but I don’t think it ever is, really, if you see what I mean. He was brought up religiously and likes to set an example whenever he can. When we were first married I never really did hear him say anything like that — not until these last few years. I’d think I’d hear him muttering these things to himself, and then sometimes it would come out right loudly — jobjam and those other things, you see — especially when he’s talking about our young Goody’s friends, or her beginning lipstick or anything, or wearing shorts, you see. For quite a while I used to think it was profane; but if I listened closely, then I didn’t think so because I could hear it was just jobjam or job jam the helm — —”
“What?” The doctor leaned forward attentively. “What did you say?”
“Why, job jam the helm,” Mrs. Little replied, reddening. “Sometimes I’d get to thinking he said these things so much that I ought to speak to him about it and tell him it was bad for him. You see?”
“Yes, perfectly,” the psychiatrist replied. “After you first thought you heard your husband using these strange expressions, you thought you heard them oftener. I see. Now let’s get back a little. Perhaps you might find it interesting to give me just a little talk about your childhood, and we’ll see if you can remember if anything ever shocked and upset you when you were very young.”
Bewildered, Mrs. Little tried to comply; then interrupted herself to explain that her husband really did say “job jam” for worse. It wasn’t an illusion of hers, she said repeatedly, and what she wanted advice about was how to become the kind of woman that could keep peace in her family; but the psychiatrist, smiling kindly, kept trying to lead her back to her memories of her childhood. She felt that they weren’t getting much of anywhere together, and when she left she was so worried about her own mental condition that she decided not to come again lest she be more so.
Going to lengths, she read several magazine articles on helpful wifely and motherly procedures. She even confusedly plodded through part of a book, The Family, and, hearing of an instructive play called Life with Father in which a wife and mother got away with a good deal in spite of a dominating husband and father, she went to see it; but she came forth hopeless, knowing herself not up to the lady therein depicted.
In regard to her present family life, Mrs. Little found only one comfort: she gave up the idea that she could ever hope to stand between her husband and their daughter, though she’d always keep trying; but at least she hadn’t often to try to stand between Ripley Little and their young son, Filmer. That promising boy had reached the age of fourteen, almost fifteen now, without getting Ripley Little seriously upset more than seven or eight times.
The mother realized that maybe this was because Filmer, in his home life, was carefully secretive about himself — except in perhaps too frequent references to the praise he had from his teachers — but at any rate it was a comfort, for the time being. She knew of course that Filmer’s adolescence might break out on him and get him into real trouble with his father, the way Goody’s had; but, so far, this wasn’t happening, thank heaven, and her husband sometimes even praised Filmer’s sensible conduct as a contrast to Goody’s irresponsibility. Filmer was growing up to be a good quiet little man, the father had gone so far as to say; Filmer knew how to take care of himself and how to treat older people with consideration; Filmer was too bright to look upon life as uproar and motion merely.
“Uproar!” Mrs. Little thought of the uproar that had roused her in the early dark hours of that morning, and again she gasped “Oh, my!” to her pillow.
The sunshine grew stronger upon her window shades; she heard Cousin Olita tap upon Filmer’s door to rouse him for the day; then firm footsteps, a man’s, sounded along the corridor, descended the stairway and were heard from the hall below. Straight beneath her, in the dining-room, a moment later, there was a thump as of a chair roughly used. Ripley Little was sitting down to his breakfast.
II
IN THE BUTLER’S pantry Gentry Poindexter, colored, tall, Zulu-ish and all in white, spoke with relish to his wife, the Littles’ housemaid. “Boss sutny madded up this day, Almatina. You go’ hear him cuss like you ain’t never hear him yet.”
Almatina, preparing a breakfast tray to be taken upstairs, shook her head. “You the dumb-earedest man I ever listen to, Gentry. How many times do I got to tell you it’s like Miss Olita says and Mr. Little’s cussin’ ain’t cussin’ at all. It sound like it; but it ain’t.”
“So?” the colored man said. “You and Miss Olita can tell me it ain’t cussin’ every day for seven months and Christmas; but if you right, then I ain’t got no more ability to listen good than a ant’s got money to buy him wrastlin’ pants.” He giggled whisperingly, placed a silver coffee-pot upon a Sheffield tray and stepped toward the door. “Settin’ at table ri’ now, holdin’ up the newspaper ‘tween him and Miss Olita so he ain’t got to look at her. Ain’t makin’ a sound; but he go’ be buzz-boomin’ soon! Somebody go’ start him; but it ain’t go’ be me. Ain’t go’ be Gentry tell him whut happen las’ night. No, ma’am!”
Thereupon Gentry Poindexter opened the pantry door with his knee, passed into the dining-room and refilled the coffee-cup at the elbow of the stocky-bodied, middle-aged man who sat at the head of the mahogany Georgian table and irascibly stared at a morning newspaper. Cousin Olita bore him company, so to speak; but hushedly. She looked up from her place half way down the table, and spoke in a low voice.
“You might just leave the coffee-pot, Gentry. Mr. Little may like — —”
“What?” Little looked over the top of his paper challengingly. “What may I like?”
“Nothing,” Cousin Olita said hurriedly. “I only told Gentry to leave the coffee-pot because you may like — —”
“Like?” Ripley Little said again. “I’d like to know what’s left for me to like. I’m jammed if I see what’s left for anybody to like when every time a man looks at a newspaper for nine years he either sees where Hitler’s done something worse than he did yesterday or else reads something that means he’ll have to hire three lawyers to tell him how to write down everything he does in what little business he’s got left with what little money he’s got left in a way that won’t get him into the penitentiary.” He thrust the paper from him. “It seems slightly peculiar to me that you claim to have slept through all the rumpus in this house after midnight last night. I find that hard to credit, Olita, hard to credit.” He looked sternly at the colored man. “Gentry, that noise certainly penetrated to your quarters. What was it?”
A film of blankness overspread Gentry Poindexter’s face; his eyes became opaque and his whole person expressed nonreceptivity. “Me,” he said, “I ain’t turn off layin’ on my face from ten las’ night to six o’clock after daylight.”
“What? You mean to tell me you slept through all that?”
“When I sleep,” Gentry said, “I sleep. No, suh. Whutever ’twas, Gentry ain’t hear it.”
Little frowned at him. “You didn’t hear the siren?”
“Hear whut, Mr. Little?”
“I’m asking you. You didn’t hear a police car sirening all over this neighborhood last night?”
“Police? I got nothin’ to do with them people.”
“It sounded all the way from down the street, getting louder and louder,” Ripley Little said. “It didn’t stop its noise until it got in front of this house; and right after that a car turned into our driveway and job jam if it didn’t sound to me mighty like as if it was the car that had been doing the sirening! Then somebody drove a herd of cattle into the house, turned the phonograph on, and the cows tried to dance. You heard nothing?”
“I ain’t hear no cow dance, no, suh, Mr. Little. All night long I sleepin’ sweet on my face and ain’t hear — —”
He was interrupted by the youth, Filmer, who came into the dining-room at that moment and took his place at the table. “Then you must ‘a’ been dead, not asleep,” Filmer said. “I never heard such a disgraceful noise in this house in all my whole days. Bring me my cereal, Gentry.”
“Oh, then somebody did hear something, after all!” Ripley Little looked upon his son with a frowning slight approval, as Gentry departed. “I’m glad to be corroborated. Gentry and your Cousin Olita talk as if I’m suffering from auditory delusions, Filmer. They’d both take their oath that the neighborhood and this house were so peaceful throughout the night that they slept like lambs and heard no disturbance whatever. Can you tell me what caused it?”
