“Come of Age” by B.J. Chute

Writing young adult fiction in Boy’s Life, Child Life, and Boy Scout Magazine, B.J. Chute’s work ranges from fantastical romance to silly farce. In 1944’s “Come of Age,” her short story about a young boy coping with the unimaginable, Chute depicts the innocence of World War II-era America alongside devastating grief in the eyes of a child. As a product of its time, the story gives a snapshot of idyllic family life interrupted by the horror of war.

Published on September 30, 1944

 

Content Warning: A racial slur

 

Timothy crossed the road at the exact place where the tar ended and the dirt began, paused on the sidewalk, squinted up at the sun and gave a heave of satisfaction. He was too warm with his sweater on. He had known he was going to be too warm, and he had made a firm announcement to this effect to his mother before he left the house in the morning. Thousands of layers of woolly stuff, he had pointed out darkly, intimating that a person might easily suffocate.

Having barely survived this fate so far, he now decided to make a test case out of it. If an automobile passed him on the road before he had counted up to ten, that meant it was really spring and too warm for sweaters. His own internal workings were positive on the subject, but he was amiably willing to put the whole thing on a sporting basis.

“One,” said Timothy. After a while he added, “Two.” He then suspended his counting while he made a neat pile of his schoolbooks and lunch box, putting them carefully on a bare patch of ground, away from the few greenly white sprigs of grass that were struggling up into the sunlight. If the car came by, he would have to put the books on the ground anyhow, in order to take off his sweater, so it seemed wiser to do it ahead of time.

“Three,” said Timothy, looking up the road. There was nothing in sight, so he closed his eyes, waited, said “Four” and opened them again. This time it worked. There was a car coming. Timothy put his hands to his sweater and stood pantingly prepared to jerk it over his head.

The car swished by with a friendly toot.

“Five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten,” said Timothy rapidly, just to be perfectly fair about the whole thing, vanished momentarily into the sweater and reappeared with his hair standing on end and the expression of one who had been saved from total collapse in the nick of time.

He turned the sweater virtuously right side to again, with his mother in mind, and tied its arms around his waist, allowing the rest of it to fall comfortably to the rear, where it could flap without giving him any sense of responsibility. Then he tucked his schoolbooks under one arm, picked up the lunchbox and peered hopefully inside it. There were three cake crumbs and some orange peel. He licked his finger, collected the crumbs on the end of it and disposed of them tidily, then extracted a piece of the peel and took a thoughtful nibble.

It tasted vaguely like a Christmas tree, but rather leathery, so he put it back, felt a momentary dejection based on a sudden desperate need for a great deal of food, recovered rapidly, took another look at the sun and gave a pleased snort.

It was certainly spring, and for once it was starting on a Friday afternoon, which meant he would have the whole weekend to get used to it in. Also, by some great and good accident, his sixth-grade English teacher had forgotten to assign the weekly composition. This was almost incredibly gratifying, especially since the rumor had got around that she had been going to give them the dismal topic of What My Country Means to Me.

Timothy sighed with satisfaction over the narrow escape of the sixth-grade English class, knowing quite well the same topic would turn up again next week, but that next week was years away. Besides, she might change her mind and assign something else. One week she had told them to write what she referred to as a word portrait, called A Member of My Family. Timothy had enjoyed that richly. He had written, inevitably, about his brother Bricky, and it was the longest composition he had ever achieved in his life. He felt a great pity for his classmates, who didn’t have Bricky to write about, since Bricky was not only the most remarkable person in the world but he was at that moment engaged in being a hero in the South Pacific. He was a pilot with silver wings and a bomber, and Timothy basked luxuriously in the warmth of his glory.

“Yoicks,” said Timothy, addressing the spring and life in general. “Yoicks” was Bricky’s favorite expression.

“Yoicks,” he said again.

He was, at the moment, five blocks from home. The first block he used up in not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk, which was not the mindless process it appeared to be. He was actually conducting an elaborate reconnaissance program, and the cracks were vital supply lines. By the second block, however, his attitude on supplies had taken a more personal turn, and he spent the distance reflecting that this was the day his mother baked cookies. His imagination carried him willingly up the back steps, through the unlatched screen door and to the cooky jar, but there it gave up for lack of specific information on the type of cookies involved.

Besides, he was now at the third block, and the third block was important, consisting largely of a vacant lot with a run-down little shack lurching sideways in a corner of it. The old brown grass of last autumn and the matted tangle of vines and weeds were showing a faint stirring of greenness like a pale web.

At the edge of the lot, Timothy paused and his whole manner changed. He became alert and his eyes narrowed, shifting from left to right. He was listening intently. The only sound was the peevish chirp of a sparrow; but Timothy was a world away from it. What he was listening for was the warning roar of revved-up motors.

In a moment now, from behind that shack, from beyond those tangled vines, Japanese planes would swarm upward viciously, in squadron attack.

Timothy put down the books and the lunch box, then he stepped back, holding himself steady. His hand moved, fingers curved knowingly, to control and throttle, and from his parted lips there suddenly burst a chattering roar.

The Liberator surged forward gallantly to meet the attackers. Timothy’s face became tense, and he interrupted the engine’s explosive revolutions for a moment to warn himself grimly, “This is it. Watch yourselves, men.” He then nodded soberly. It was a grave responsibility for the pilot, knowing the crew trusted him to see them through.

The pilot, of course, was Bricky. It was Bricky who was holding the plane steady on its course, nerving himself for the final instant of action. The deadly swarm of Zeros swept forward, but the pilot’s face remained impassive.

Z-z-z-zoom, they spread across the sky, their evil advance punctuated by the hail of machine-gun fire. The Liberator climbed, settling back on her tail in instant response to the pilot’s sure hand. As she scaled the clouds, the bright silver of her name, painted along the side, shone defiantly — The Hornet. Bricky had at one time piloted a plane called The Hornet. It was the best name that Timothy knew.

After that, it was short and sharp. A Jap fighter detached itself from the humming swarm. The Hornet rolled and the tail gunner squeezed the triggers. The plane exploded in midair, disintegrated and streamered to earth in flaming wreckage.

“Right on the nose,” said the gunner with satisfaction.

The Hornet had their range now. Zero after Zero fluttered helplessly down out of the sky, dissolving into the earth. The others turned and skittered for their home base, terrified before the invincibility of American man and machine.

A faint smile flickered across the face of The Hornet’s pilot, and he permitted himself a nod of satisfaction. “Good show,” he said.

Timothy sat down on the ground and drew a deep breath. Then he said “Gosh!” and scrambled back to his feet. At home, even now, there might be a letter waiting from Bricky, full of breathless and wonderful details that could be relayed to the fellows at school. A few of them, of course, had brothers of their own in the Air Force, but none of them had Bricky, and that made all the difference. He was quite sorry for them, but most willing to share and to expound.

Gosh, he missed Bricky, but, gosh, it was worth it.

A dream crept across his mind. Maybe the war would last for years. Maybe some one of these days, a new pilot would stand before his commanding officer somewhere in Pacific territory and make a firm salute. “Lieutenant Baker reporting for duty, sir.”

His commanding officer would look up quickly from his notes. “Timothy!” Bricky would say, holding it all back. They would shake hands.

For the entire next block toward home, Timothy shook hands with his brother, but on the last block spring got into his heels and he raced the distance like a lunatic, yelling his jubilee. The porch steps he took in two leaps, crashed happily into the front hall and smacked his books and his lunchbox down on the hall table. He then opened his mouth to shout for his mother, not because he wanted her for anything specific, but because he simply needed to know her exact location.

His mouth, opened to “Hey, mom!” closed suddenly in surprise. His father’s hat was lying on the hall table. There was nothing to prepare him for his father’s hat on the hall table at three-thirty in the afternoon. His father’s hat kept regular hours. An unaccountable sense of formality descended on Timothy. He looked anxiously into the hall mirror and made a gesture toward flattening the top lock of his hair. It sprang up again under his hand, and he compromised on untying the sleeves of his sweater from around his waist and putting it firmly down on top of his books. None of this had anything to do with his father, who maintained strict neutrality on the subject of his son’s appearance. It was entirely a matter between Timothy, the time of day, and that unexpected gray felt hat on the hall table.

There were a dozen reasons for dad’s having come home early. There was nothing to get excited about. Timothy turned his back on the hall table and the hat, opened the door and went through into the living room. There was no one there, but he could hear his father’s voice in the kitchen, and, because the kitchen was a reassuring place, he felt better. He went on into the kitchen, shoving the door only part open and easing himself through it.

His mother was sitting on the kitchen chair beside the kitchen table. She was just sitting there, not doing anything. She never sat anywhere like that, doing nothing.

The formal, pressed-down feeling returned to Timothy and stuck in his throat.

He looked toward his father appealingly, but his father was leaning against the sink, with his hands behind him pressed against it, and staring down at the floor.

“Mom — ” said Timothy.

They both looked at him then, but it was his father who answered. He answered right away, as if it had to be said fast. “You’ll have to know, Tim,” he said, almost roughly. “It’s Bricky. He’s missing in action.” Missing in action. He had met the phrase so many times that it wasn’t frightening. There was no possible connection in his mind between “missing in action” and Bricky …

Missing in action. It was a picture on a movie screen, nothing more. Bricky, the invincible, would have bailed out, perhaps somewhere in the jungle. Or he would have nursed his damaged crate down to earth in a fantastically cool exhibition of flying skill, his men trusting him to see them through.

A hot, fierce pride surged up in Timothy. He wanted to tell his mother and father not to look that way; that Bricky, wherever he was, was safe. He wanted to reassure them, so that they would be smiling at him again and all the old cozy confidence would return to the kitchen.

His father was dragging words out, one by one. “The plane didn’t come back,” he said. “They were on a bombing mission, and they didn’t come back. We just got the telegram.”

An awful thing happened then. Timothy’s mother began to cry. He had never in his life seen her cry. It had never occurred to him that she was capable of it, and a monstrous chasm of insecurity yawned suddenly at his feet.

His father went over to her and got down on his knees on the kitchen linoleum, and he stayed there with his arm around her shoulders, murmuring, with his cheek against her hair, “Don’t, Ellen. Don’t, dearest.”

Timothy stood there in the middle of the floor with his hands jammed stiffly into his pockets and his eyes turned away from his father and mother. He was much more frightened by their sudden unfamiliarity than by what his father had told him. “Missing in action” was just words. His mother crying was a sheer impossibility, made visible before him.

He realized that he had to get out of the kitchen right away, because it was the place he had always been safest, and now that made it unendurable. He couldn’t do anything, anyway. Later, when his mother wasn’t — when his mother felt better, he could explain to her about Bricky being safe. He slid out of the room like a ghost, and, linked in their fear, neither of them even looked up.

In the front hall, he stopped for a moment. The spring sun outside was shining, bright and warm, on the street, and he knew exactly how the heat of it would feel slanting across his shoulders. But his mother had thought he ought to wear his sweater today. He wanted very badly to do something to make her feel better. He frowned and pulled the sweater on over his head, jamming his arms into the sleeves and resisting the temptation to push up the cuffs. It stretched them, his mother said.

He went slowly down the front steps, worrying about his mother. The words “missing in action” still meant exactly nothing to him. They were only another installment in the exciting war serial that was Bricky’s Pacific adventures, and there was not the slightest shadow of doubt in his mind about Bricky’s safe return, though he was eager for details. He guessed none of the other fellows at school had members of their family gallantly missing in action.

No, it wasn’t Bricky that made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. The thing was he hadn’t known that grownups cried, and the discovery took a good deal of stability out of his world.

His mother might go on being frightened for days ahead, until they heard that Bricky was all right, and he would be tiptoeing around her in his mind all the time to make things better for her, and what he would really be wanting would be for things to be again the way they had been before.

He didn’t want to feel all unsettled inside. The way he felt now was the way he had felt the time they had been waiting to hear from his sister in California when the baby came. He had known quite well that Margaret would be fine and everything, but just the same, the baby’s coming had got into the house and filled it with uncertainties. Now it was the War Department. He was suddenly quite angry with the War Department. Bricky wasn’t going to like it, either, when he got back. He wouldn’t like mom worrying. Timothy wished now he had stayed a little longer in the kitchen and asked a few questions. He would have liked to know what that War Department had said, and, as he went down the street without any particular aim or direction, he turned it over and over in his mind.

He had walked back, without meaning to, to the vacant lot with the old shack on it, and it occurred to him that, while he had been shooting down those Jap planes in Bricky’s Hornet, his mother and father had been there in the kitchen. Looking like that.

He left the sidewalk and walked into the grassy tangle, scuffing his shoes through last autumn’s leaves. He would have liked some company, and he toyed for a moment with going over to Davy Peters’ house and telling him that the War Department had sent them a telegram about Bricky, but decided against it.

He sat down on the grass with his back against the wall of the shack. He could feel the rough coolness of the brown boards even through his sweater, and the sun spilled warmth down his front. It was unthinkable that the shack should ever be more comforting than the kitchen at home, but this time it was.

He wished he knew just what the telegram had said. There was something, he thought, that they always put in. Something about “We regret to inform you,” but maybe that was just for soldiers’ families when the soldier had got killed. He had seen a movie that had that in it once, and it had made quite an impression, because in the movie it was all tied up with not talking about the things you knew, and for days Timothy had gone around with a tightly shut mouth and the look of one who is giving no aid and comfort to the enemy. He had even torn the corners off all Bricky’s letters and burned them up with a fine secret feeling of citizenship, and then he had regretted it afterward, when he remembered it was only the United States APO address and no good to anyone. It was too bad, in a way, because they would have made a good collection. On the other hand, he already had eighteen separate and distinct collections, and the shelf in his room, the corner of the second drawer down in the living room desk, and the excellent location behind the laundry tub in the basement were all getting seriously overcrowded.

He wondered if maybe later he could have the telegram. He could start a good collection with the telegram, he thought. He would print on a piece of paper, “Things Relating to My Brother Bricky,” and paste it onto a box. He even knew the box he would use. It held his father’s golf shoes, but some kind of arrangement could be worked out for putting the shoes somewhere else. His father was very good about that sort of thing, once he understood boxes were really needed, and, later on, this one could hold all the souvenirs and medals and things Bricky would bring home.

The telegram, which maybe began “We regret to inform you,” would fit neatly into the box without having to be folded. It would go on with something about “your son, Lieutenant Ronald Baker,” and then there would be something more, not quite clear in his mind, about “He is reported missing in action over the South Pacific, having failed to return from an important bombing mission.”

Timothy scowled at a sparrow. There was another part that went with the “missing in action” part. Missing, believed — Missing, believed killed.

That was when it hit him. That was the moment when he suddenly realized what had happened — when the thing that the telegram stood for took shape clearly before him, not as something that had frightened his mother and made his father hold her very tight, but as something real about Bricky.

Bricky, his brother. Bricky, with whom he had sat a hundred times in this exact place and talked and talked, Bricky who went fishing with him, who showed him how to tie a sheepshank, who was going to help him build a radio when he came back.

“When he comes back,” said Timothy aloud, licking his lips because they had unaccountably gone dry. But suppose now that Bricky didn’t come back? Suppose that telegram was the end of everything?

It was the vacant lot and the shack that weren’t safe anymore. In the kitchen, he had known, without questioning it, that Bricky was all right. It was here, out in the open, that fear had come crawling. Bricky was dead. He knew Bricky was dead, and he was dead thousands of miles from anywhere, and they wouldn’t see him again ever.

Timothy sat there, and the pain in his stomach wasn’t anything like the pain you got from eating too much or being hungry. He rocked back and forth, not very much, but enough to cradle the sharpness of it, being careful not to breathe, because if he breathed it went down too far inside and hurt too much. If he could just sit there, maybe, not breathing

He couldn’t. There came a time when his lungs took a deep gulp of air without his having anything to do with it, and when that time came there was no way of holding out any longer.

Bricky was dead. He gave a great strangled sob and rolled over on his face, sprawling across the ground, and everything that was good and safe and beautiful quit the earth and left him with nothing to hold on to. He clung to the grass, shaking desperately with fear and pain and loss, and the immensity and the loneliness and the danger of being a human rolled over and over him in drowning waves.

Behind him, the shack, which only a little while ago had been a shelter for the sneak attack of Zero planes, was immobile and solid in the sunshine. It was only a shack in a vacant lot. The tumbled weeds and vines above which The Hornet had swooped and soared were weeds and vines, not a battleground for airborne knights.

It wasn’t that way. It wasn’t that way at all. It had nothing to do with a gallant plane, outnumbered but triumphant. It had nothing to do with the Bricky who had flown in his brother’s dreams, as safe and invincible as Saint George.

A plane was a thing that could be shot down out of the safe sky by murderous gunfire. Bricky was a man whose body could be thrown from the cockpit and spin senselessly down into cold water. It was a cheat. The whole thing was a cheat.

The war — this vague big thing that moved in shadowy headlines, in a glorious pageantry of medals and flags and brave men shaking hands — wasn’t that at all. He had thought it was something like the Holy Grail and King Arthur, that it shone with beauty and was very high and proud.

And it wasn’t. It was fear and this hollowed panic inside him, and it was not seeing Bricky again. Not seeing him again ever. That was why his mother had cried.

That was why his father’s voice had been so rough and quick. And it wasn’t to be endured. He breathed in shivering gasps, there with his face buried in cool-smelling grass and earth and the sun friendly and gentle on his shoulders that didn’t feel it anymore. It would go on like this, day after day and week after week. Bricky was dead, and the place where Bricky had been would never be filled in.

That was what war was, and he knew about it now, and the knowledge was too awful and too immense to be borne. He wanted his mother. He wanted to run to her and to hold to her tightly and to cry his heart out with her arms around his shoulders and her reassuring voice in his ears.

But his mother felt like this, too, and his father. There was no safety anywhere. No one could help him, except himself, and he was eleven years old. He didn’t want to know about all these things. He didn’t want to know what war really was. He wanted it to be a picture on a movie screen again, with excitement and glory and men being brave. Not this immense, unendurable fear and emptiness. He couldn’t even cry.

He was eleven years old, and he lay there face down in the grass, and he couldn’t cry. He groped for anything to ease him, and he thought perhaps Bricky’s plane hadn’t been alone when it crashed to the flat blue water. He thought that other planes might have been blotted out with it — planes with big red suns painted on them.

But even that didn’t do any good. There were men in those planes with the suns on them. Not men like men he knew, not Americans, but real people just the same. No one had told him that he would one day know that the enemy were real people, no one had warned him against finding it out.

He pressed closer against the ground, trying to draw comfort up from it, but he kept shaking. “Now I lay me down to sleep,” said Timothy into the grass. “Now I lay me down to sleep. Now I lay me — ”

It was a long, long time before the shaking stopped. He was surprised, at the end of it, to find that he was still there on the ground. He pushed away from it and sat up, his head swimming. The sun was much lower now, and a little wind had sprung up to move the vines around him so they swayed against the shack. The sweater felt good around his shoulders, and it was the sweater that made him realize suddenly that he couldn’t go on lying there waiting for the world to stop and end the pain.

The world wasn’t going to stop. It was going right on, and Timothy Baker was still in it. He would go on being in it, and the thing inside him would go on being the thing inside him. He would have, somehow, to live with that too. He would have to go back to the house, to the kitchen, to his mother and father, to school, to coming home and knowing that Bricky wouldn’t be there.

Timothy looked around. He felt weak and dizzy, the way he’d felt once after a fever. The shack was there, with no Jap Zeros behind it. The place where he had stood when he was being Bricky and The Hornet was just a piece of ground. His mouth drew in, with his teeth clipping his lower lip, while he stared. There wasn’t any escape. He would have to go back — along the sidewalk, up the path, through the front door, into the hallway, into the living room, into the kitchen. There wasn’t any escape from his mother’s eyes or his father’s voice. He knew all about it now, and he was stiff and sore from knowing about it.

He saw what he had to do. He had to go home and face that telegram. He got to his feet. He brushed off the dry bits of grass that had clung to the blurred wool of his sweater, and he pulled the cuffs around straight, so they wouldn’t be stretched wrong. Then he walked across the grass, out of the lot and onto the sidewalk, holding himself very carefully against the pain.

He held himself that way all the distance back, and when he got to his own front yard he was able to walk quite directly and quickly up the path and up the steps. He turned the doorknob and he went into the front hall. It was getting darker outdoors already, and the hall was dim. It was a moment before he realized that his father was standing in the hallway, waiting for him.

He stopped where he was, getting the pieces of himself together. He wasn’t even shaking now, and some vague kind of pride stirred deep down inside him.

He said, “Dad” dragging the monosyllable out.

“Yes, Timmy.”

“May I see the telegram, please?”

His father reached into his pocket and took out the brown leather wallet that he carried papers around in. The telegram was on top of some letters and bills, and it was strange to see it already so much a part of their living that it was jostled by business things.

Timothy took the yellow envelope and opened it carefully. There it was. “Lieutenant Ronald Baker, missing in action.” The stiff formality of the printed words made it seem so final that he felt the coldness and the fear spreading through him again, the way it had been at the shack. His mind wanted to drag away from the piece of paper, and he had to force it to think instead.

With careful stubbornness, he read the telegram again. It wasn’t really very much that the War Department said — just that the plane had not returned and that the family would be advised of any further news. He read the last part once more. Any further news. That meant the War Department wasn’t sure what had happened. Bricky might have bailed out somewhere. There had been stories in the newspaper about fliers who bailed out and were picked up later. That was a hope. Timothy weighed it carefully in his mind, not letting himself clutch at it, and it was still a hope. It was a perfectly fair one that they were entitled to, he and his father and mother.

He held his thoughts steady on that for a moment, and then he made them go on logically and precisely. Another thing that could have happened was that Bricky had gone down somewhere over land that was held by the Japanese. If that was it, Bricky might be a prisoner of war. Prisoners of war came back. That was another hope, and it was a perfectly fair one too.

He had two hopes, then. They were reasonable hopes, and he had a right to hang on to them very tightly. The telegram didn’t say “believed killed.” Frowning, he went through it in his head again, adding up as if it were an arithmetic problem. There were three things that the telegram could mean. Two of them were on the side of Bricky’s safety, and one was against it. Two chances to one was almost a promise.

Timothy drew a deep breath and handed the telegram back to his father. His father took it without saying anything, then he put his hand against the back of Timothy’s neck and rubbed his fingers up through the stubbly hair. For just a moment, Timothy turned his head, pressing close against the buttons of his father’s coat, then he pulled away.

“Can I go outdoors for a little while?” he said.

“Sure. I guess supper will be the usual time.”

They nodded to each other, then Timothy turned and went out of the house. He went down the steps, his hands jammed in his pockets, and began to walk along the sidewalk, feeling still a little hollow, but perfectly steady.

His heart fitted him again. It had stopped pounding against the cage of his ribs, and it didn’t hurt anymore. The old feeling of safety and comfort was beginning to come back, but now it wasn’t a part of his home or of the day. It was inside himself and solid, so that he couldn’t mislay it again ever. He pushed his hair away from his forehead, letting the wind get at it. The air was cooler now and felt good, and he had a vague moment of being hungry.

Then he looked around him. He was back at the vacant shack, and the shack had been waiting there for him to come. He eyed it gravely. Behind the shack were the Jap Zeros. They had been waiting for him too. He knew they were there and that their force was overwhelming. Timothy’s fingers reached automatically for the controls of his plane. His jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed, and he opened his mouth to let out the roar of motors.

And, suddenly, he stopped. His hand dropped down to his side and his mouth shut. He stood there quite quietly for a moment, as if he had lost something and were trying to remember what it was. Then he gave a sigh of relinquishment.

His fingers curled firmly around air again and closed, but this time they didn’t close on the controls of a machine. They closed on dangling reins.

“Come on, Silver, old boy,” said Timothy softly to the evening. “They’ve got the jump on us, but we can catch them yet.”

He touched his spurs to his gallant pinto pony, and, wheeling, he loped away across the sunlit plain.

Featured image: Illustration by Stevan Dohanos (© SEPS)

“Not Wanted” by Jesse Lynch Williams

In 1918, Jesse Lynch Williams won the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play, Why Marry? The Princeton graduate wrote on the early century college experience — in fiction and nonfiction — and focused on conflict in families and relationships in his drama. His short story “Not Wanted,” an O. Henry Award finalist, follows a young man’s strained relationship with his father as he makes his way through boarding school.

Published on November 17, 1923

 

“And when at last they put his first-born in his strong arms and the little pink tendril-like fingers closed about his thumb a strange tenderness suffused the father’s frame,” and so on.

…

Phil had read it in a book. But life did not come true to literature. When they put his first-born in his arms a strange nausea suffused this father’s frame and he handed the warm little bundle back to his sister hastily, as if it were hot.

“Take it away,” he whispered to Mary. “I might break it.”

And he bolted out of the room, for the doctor said he could see Nell now. The only joy he felt was over a less vainglorious but more important matter than becoming a father. The beautiful brave mother was all right.

This young man had not wanted to become a father; not in the least. He and Junior’s mother had been happy together. Now they would have to be happy apart, if at all, for whole years at a time, until Junior was big enough to stand trips to the wilds of Alaska or Africa or wherever else mining engineers had to go. Nell had always gone along until this usurper spoiled their life together. So Junior was really doing a scandalous thing, coming between husband and wife. No wonder that Phil had not wanted him.

Well, Junior’s mother wanted him anyway. She wanted him terrifically, more than anything in the world except Junior’s father. And as her husband wanted her to have everything she desired, why, probably it was all right. There was not much else that she had lacked.

Junior did not seem to understand that he wasn’t wanted by his father, and took to Phil from the first. “All babies do,” said the jealous young aunt. “It’s a great gift and it’s wasted on a man.” Mary was a maiden, but she had hopes.

“He’s so big and so kind,” said the contented mother. “Children, dogs and old ladies always adore Phil.”

With Junior it was clearly a case of love at first sight, and he did not act as if he were a victim of unrequited affection. For example, unlike a woman scorned, he had no fury for his father at all except when Phil left the room. Then he howled. His father could soothe him when even his mother failed, and Junior would settle down into Phil’s arms with a sigh of voluptuous satisfaction, quite as if he belonged there; and, of course, he did. That was the dismaying part about it to his father, who scowled and looked bored. This made the young mother laugh; and that in turn made Junior laugh, too, and look down at her from the eminence of his father’s arms, as if trying to wink and say “Rather a joke on the old man.”

“I suppose I’ve got to do this all my life,” said Phil.

“All your life,” said Nell, rubbing it in; “but after a while you’ll like it.”

She had great faith in her son’s charm.

Junior was five years old when his father came back from the Alaska project. He could not remember having met this grown-up before, but he might have said “I have heard so much about you.” His mother had told him. For example, his father was the best and bravest man in the world. Also, according to the same reliable authority, he loved Junior and his mother enormously and equally. He was far away, getting bread and butter for them. A wonderful person, a great big man, six feet two inches “and well proportioned,” and such an honorable gentleman that —  well, that was the only reason he was not coming home with a huge fortune, she explained. But at any rate he was coming home at last, and would be awfully glad to see what a big boy Junior had become.

He was, but Phil had always been rather shy with strangers, and he did not pay so much attention to his namesake as Junior had been led to expect. You see, everyone in this tyrant’s kingdom worshiped him, and Junior assumed that his father would follow conventions. For every night before he went to sleep his father’s name had invariably been mentioned first in the list of people and animals and playthings that loved him.

Junior, though quite small, was a great lover, and much given to kissing. On momentous occasions, such as the start for the picnic the day after his father’s arrival, Junior manifested his excitement by hugging and kissing everybody in sight, including the dogs. It was his earliest form of self-expression. His father, as it happened, was absorbed in packing the tea basket and had never been accustomed to being kissed while packing in camp. Besides, Junior had been helping his mother prepare the luncheon. That is, he had taken a hand in the distribution of guava jelly, and there was just one hardship in the life of this immaculate mining engineer he could never endure — sticky fingers. But Junior had not yet learned that, and so, taking advantage of his father’s kneeling posture, he tackled him around the neck and indulged in passionate osculation.

“Call your child off,” said Phil to Nell. She laughed.

“Come, precious, don’t bore your father.”

Junior did not know what that new word “bore” meant, but he released his father and transferred his demonstration to his mother. She never seemed to get too much and did not object to sweet fingers.

“Mamma,” said Junior as they started off in the car, “I don’t believe that man in front likes me.”

“He adores you, darling; he’s your father.”

Well, it sounded reasonable, but he remembered the new word. That evening when they came home the dogs, not having been allowed to go on the picnic, thought it was their turn and jumped up on Phil with muddy paws. Junior took command of the situation and of the new word.

“Down, Rex!” he said to the sentimental setter. “Don’t bore my father.” And he pulled Rex away by the tail.

At bedtime, when the nurse came to bear him off, he raised his arms to Phil.

“Can I bore you now?”

Phil laughed and kissed him good night.

“Funny little cuss, isn’t he?” said Phil.

“He’s a very unusual child,” said this very unusual mother.

“Unusually ugly, you mean.”

But he couldn’t get a rise out of Nell.

“Oh, you’ll learn to appreciate him yet.”

Shortly before Phil left for his next trip the paternal passion had its way with this reserved father, for once. Some little street boys, as they were technically classified by the nurse, had been ordered off the drive by Junior, who was playing out there alone. They did not like his aristocratic manner and rolled him in the mud. They were pommeling him in spite of his protests, when Phil heard the outcry and, getting a glimpse of the unequal contest from the library window, gave forth a shout that made the intruders take to their heels, the infuriated father after them.

As he raced down the drive he saw the wide-eyed animal terror on his child’s face and it aroused within him an animal emotion of another kind, one he had never felt before, though he had often seen it exhibited by wild beasts —  usually the mothers. It was a lust to destroy those two little boys, to render them extinct. He might have done so too; but fortunately they had a good start, and by the time he caught up with them civilization caught up with him sufficiently to make him realize what century he was living in. So, with a few vigorous cuffs and an angry warning, he hastened back to his bleating offspring, recognizing with astonishment and some alarm how near blind parental rage can bring a man to murder.

Junior was not so much damaged as his white clothes were, but his childish terror was pitiful. He rushed into his father’s arms and clung, quivering. Phil held him close.

“There, there, it’s all right now. I won’t let anybody hurt you.”

Without realizing it, this fastidious father was kissing an extremely dirty face again and again. Junior, still sobbing convulsively, clung closer.

“You’ll always be on my side, won’t you, father?”

“You bet I will!” said Phil. “You’re my own darling little boy.”

He had had no intention of saying things quite like that, and didn’t know that he could; but it sounded all right to Junior. This moment was to be one of those vivid recollections that last through a lifetime.

With a final long-drawn sigh of complete and passionate comfort, the small boy looked up into the big man’s face and smiled.

“You love me now, don’t you, father?” he said.

“You bet I love you!”

The boy had got him at last. But perhaps Junior presumed upon this new privilege. The next morning, he awoke with a bad dream about those street boys, and as soon as the nurse permitted he rushed in to be reassured by his big father. Phil was preoccupied with shaving and did not know about the bad dream. Junior tried to climb up Phil’s legs.

“That will do,” said his father in imminent peril of cutting his chin; “get down. Get down, I tell you. Oh, Nell!” — she was in the next room — “make your child quit picking on me.”

“Come to me, dearest. Mustn’t bother father when he’s shaving.”

Junior wasn’t piqued but he was puzzled.

“But I thought he loved me; he told me he loved me,” he called out. “Didn’t you tell me you loved me, father?”

Phil laughed to cover his embarrassment. He had not reckoned on Junior’s giving him away to Nell, and knew that she was triumphing over him now, in silence.

“Your father never loves anybody before breakfast,” said Junior’s mother, smiling as she covered him with kisses.

Apparently fathers could never be like mothers.

Nell knew it was a risk, but she wanted to be with Phil as much as he wanted to be with her — the old life together they both loved. So they decided that Junior was big enough now to stand the trip to Mongolia. It was a great mistake. Before they had crossed Russia all of them regretted it — except Junior. He was having a grand time. At present he was working his way back from the door of the railway compartment to the window again, and for the third time was stepping upon his father’s feet. Phil had had a bad time with the custom officials, a bad time with the milk boxes and a bad night’s sleep. His temper broke under the strain.

“Oh, children are a damn nuisance,” he growled.

“Come, dear, look at these funny houses out of the window,” said Junior’s mother. “Aren’t they funny houses?”

That night when she was putting him to sleep with the recital of those who loved him, Junior inquired, “Mamma, what is a damn nuisance?”

“A damn nuisance,” said his mother, “is a perfect darling.”

All the same he had learned that he must avoid stepping on his father’s freshly polished boots. One more item added to the list. Mustn’t touch him with sticky hands, mustn’t play with his pipes, mustn’t make a noise when he takes his nap on the train — so many things to remember, such a small head to keep them all in.

There was no more milk. There was very little proper food of any kind for Junior in the camp, although Phil sent a small-sized expedition away over the divide for the purpose. The boy became ill. Phil ordered a special train to bring a famous physician. He even neglected his work on the boy’s account, something unprecedented for Phil. But this was no place for children. The boy would have to go home. That meant that his mother would too … All the beautiful dream of being together spoiled.

“I’m going back to America because I am a damn nuisance to my father,” Junior announced to Phil’s assistant.

Phil neglected his work again and went with them as far as the border. “But you do love him,” said Nell; “you know you do. You’d give up your life for him.”

“Naturally. All I object to is giving up my wife for him.”

But Phil’s last look was at the poor little sickly boy. He wondered if he would ever see him again. He did. But he never saw his wife again.

It was too late to do anything about it. His assistant, who had seen these married lovers together, marveled at the way his silent chief went about the day’s work until his responsibility to the syndicate was discharged. Then he marveled more when just as the opportunity of a professional lifetime came to Phil he threw up his job and started for home.

He meant to stay there. He would get into the office end of the work and devote the rest of his life to Nell’s boy. That was his job now. Previously he had left it to her —  too much so. The brave girl! Never a whine in all the blessed years of their marriage. The child until now had seemed merely to belong to him, a luxury he did not particularly want. Now he belonged to the child, a necessity, and being needed made Phil want him. But the Great War postponed this plan.

So Junior continued to live with his devoted Aunt Mary. She cherished his belief in Phil’s perfection, but she could not understand why her busy brother never wrote to his adoring little son. But for that matter, Phil never wrote to his adoring little sister. He never wrote letters at all, except on business. He sent telegrams and cables — long expensive ones.

On the memorable day when father and son were reunited at last an unwelcome shyness came upon them and fastened itself there like a bad habit. Neither knew how to break it. Each looked at the other wistfully with eyes that were veiled.

Junior was more proud of his wonderful father now than ever. Phil had a scar on his chin. The boy was keen to hear all about it. His father did not seem inclined to talk of that, and Junior had a precocious fear of boring him. He had made up his mind never to be a damn nuisance to his father again. He had long since discovered the meaning of those words.

Phil soon became restless and discontented with office work. He had done the other thing too long and too well to enjoy civilization for more than a month or so at a time, and the financial crowd infuriated him. He was interested in mining problems. They were interested in mining profits.

Owing to changes wrought by the war another great opportunity had arisen in a part of the world Phil knew better than any other member of his profession. “It’s a man’s job,” they told him, “and you’re the only one who could swing it.”

Phil shook his head. “Not fair to the boy.”

“But with the contract we’re prepared to offer you, why, your boy will be on Easy Street all his life.”

That got him. “Just once more,” thought Phil. “I’ll clean up on this and then retire to the country — make a real home for him — dogs and horses. I’ll teach him to shoot and fish. That ought to bring us together.”

So Junior’s father was arranging to go away again. He told the boy about the plan for the future. And we’ll spend a lot of time in the woods together,” said Phil. “I’ll make a good camper of you. Your mother was a good camper.” This comforted the silent little fellow and he did not let the team come until after Phil’s back was turned.

Meanwhile Phil had been going into the school question with the same thoroughness he devoted to every other job he undertook.

And now the epochal time had come for Junior to go away to boarding school. He was rather young for it, but Aunt Mary, it seems, was going to be married at last.

She volunteered to accompany the boy on the journey and see him through the first day. His father was very busy, of course, with preparations for his much longer and more important journey. Junior had always been fond of Aunt Mary, had transferred to her a little of the passionate devotion that had belonged to his mother. Only a little. The rest was all for his father, though Phil did not know it, and sometimes watched these two together with hungry eyes, wondering how they laughed and loved so comfortably.

On the evening before the great day his father said, “I know several of the masters up there.” A little later he added, “One of the housemasters was a classmate of mine at college.” Then he said, “I’ve been thinking it over. Maybe I better go up there with you myself.”

“Oh, if you only would!” thought the little fellow. But he considered himself a big fellow now and had learned to repress such impulses, just as he and the dogs had learned not to jump up and kiss Phil’s face. So all Junior said was, “That’s awfully kind of you, but can you spare the time?” He always became self-conscious in his father’s presence.

“You’d rather have your Aunt Mary? Well, of course, that’s all right.”

“No, but” — Junior dropped his eyes and raised them again — “sure I won’t be a nuisance to you?”

Phil had forgotten the association of that word. All he saw was that the boy wanted him more than he did Mary and it pleased him tremendously. “Then that’s all fixed,” he said.

The housemaster was of the hearty pseudoslangy sort. He said to Junior’s father, “Skinny little cuss, isn’t he? Well, we’ll soon build him up.”

“Aleck, I want you to take good care of this fellow,” said Phil. “He’s all I’ve got, you know.”

“Oh, I’ll keep a strict eye on him, and if he gets fresh I’ll bat him over the head.”

Junior knew that he was supposed to smile at this and did so. He did not feel much like smiling. He discovered that he was to be in the housemaster’s house. He did not believe that he would ever like this Mr. Fielding, but he did in time.

As it came nearer and nearer his father’s train time the terrible sinking feeling became worse, and he was afraid that he might cry after all; and that would disgrace his father. They walked down to the station together. They walked slowly. They would not see each other again for a year — maybe two. Both were thinking about it, neither referring to it. “I suppose that’s the golf links over there?” said Junior.

“I suppose so,” said Phil. He hadn’t looked.

There were a number of fathers and a greater number of mothers saying goodbye. Some of the mothers were crying, all of them were kissing their boys. Even some of the fathers did that. Junior and Phil saw it. They glanced at each other and then away again, both wondering whether it would be done by them; each hoping so, yet fearing it wouldn’t be. Phil remembered how when he was a youngster he hated to be kissed before the other boys. He did not want to mortify the manly little fellow; and the boy knew better than to begin such things. (“Don’t bore your father.”)

“Well,” said Phil, looking at his watch, “I suppose I might as well get on the train.” Then he laughed as though that were funny. “Goodbye,” he said. “Work hard and you’ll have a good time here. Goodbye, Junior.” The father held out his hand.

The son shook it. “Goodbye, father. I’ll bet you have a great trip in the mountains.” And Junior laughed too. The train pulled out, and the forlorn little boy was alone now. Worse. Surrounded by strangers.

“Well, I didn’t mortify him, anyway,” said the father.

“Well, I didn’t cry before him, anyway,” said the son. But he was doing it now.

The veil between them was not yet lifted.

Junior had a roommate named Black. So he was called Blackie. Blackie had a nice mother who used to come to see him frequently.

Junior took considerable interest in mothers, observed them closely when even the most observant of them were quite unaware of it. He approved of his roommate’s mother, despite her telling Blackie not to forget his rubbers, dear. Blackie glanced at Junior to see if he was listening. Junior pretended that he wasn’t.

“Aren’t mothers queer?” said Blackie after she had gone.

“Sure,” said Junior.

“Always worrying about you. You know how it is.”

“Sure.”

“I bet your mother’s the same way.”

Junior hesitated. “My mother’s dead,” he said. “Bet I can beat you to the gate.” They raced and Junior beat him.

But he soon perceived that he would never make an athlete, and so he was a nonentity all through the early part of his school career, one of the little fellows in the lower form, thin legs and squeaky voice.

The things on the walls of Junior’s room — spears, arrows, shields and an antelope head — first drew attention to Junior’s only distinction. That was why he had put them there.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said with some arrogance, after the expected admiration and curiosity had been elicited. “You just ought to see my father’s collection.” And this gave Junior his chance to tell about the collector. “These things — only some junk he didn’t want and sent to me.”

This was not strictly true. His father had not sent them. Junior had begged them from his aunt, and she was glad to get them out of her new house. They did not go in any of her rooms. It was soon spread about the school, as Junior knew it would be, that this skinny little fellow in the lower form had a father who was worthwhile, a dare-devil who led expeditions to distant and dangerous lands and seldom lived at home. He had killed his man, it seems, had nearly lost his life from an attack by a hostile tribe in Africa. He became a romantic, somewhat mythical figure.

“When my old man was in college,” said Smithy, also a lower-form boy and envious of Junior’s vicarious fame, “he made the football team.”

“My father was the captain of his eleven,” said Junior.

“My father was in the war,” said Smithy.

“Mine was wounded.”

But he soon observed that one could not boast too openly about one’s father. Smithy made that mistake about the family possessions — yachts and the like. He was squelched by an upper-form boy. Junior became subtle. He caused questions to be asked and answered them reluctantly, it seemed.

Many of the boys had photographs of fathers in khaki. Junior went them one better. After the Christmas holidays the crowded mantelpiece included an old faded kodak of Phil in a tropical explorer’s costume — white helmet, rifle, binoculars, cartridge belt. It had been taken as a joke by one of his engineer associates in Africa but it was taken seriously by Junior and his associates in school.

“Where is the scar from the African spear-thrust?” asked Smithy.

“It doesn’t show in the picture,” said Junior, “but he often lets me see it. He and I always go fishing together in the North Woods when he’s in this country. Long canoe trips. I enjoy camping with him because he’s had a pretty good deal of experience at that sort of thing.”

Junior established a very interesting personality for Phil.

“Gee! I wish my father was like that,” said one of the boys. “My old man always gives me hell.”

One day during the second year Blackie said, “June, why doesn’t your father ever come here to see you?”

“Oh, he’s so seldom in this country, and he’s terribly busy when he gets here. Barely has time to jump from one large undertaking to another.” He had heard Aunt Mary’s husband say “large undertaking.”

“Well, some of the fellows think you’re just bluffing about your father.”

“Huh! They’re jealous. Look at Smithy’s father. Nothing but money and fat. Huh!”

Then came the great day when a wireless arrived for Junior. Very few boys get messages from their fathers by wireless. “Land Friday,” it said. “Coming to see you Saturday.” Ah! That would show them!

Junior jumped into a sort of first-page prominence in the news of the day. He let some of his friends see the wireless. And now all of them would see his father on Saturday. That was the day of the game. Junior would have a chance to exhibit him before the whole school. “Six feet two and well proportioned.” “Captain of his team in college.” He planned it all out carefully. They would arrive late at the game and Junior would lead him down the line. But he would do it with a matter-of-fact manner as if used to going to games with his father.

On Friday he received a telegram. “Sorry can’t make it stop am wiring headmaster permission spend weekend with me stop meet at office lunch time stop go to ball game and theater in the evening.” It was a straight telegram at that, not a night letter. That would show the boys what kind of father he had.

“Hot dog!” they said. “But look here! You’ll miss the game.”

“The game” meant the great school game, of course, not the mere world-series event Junior was going to.

“Well, you see, he doesn’t have many chances to be with me. I’ll have to go.” A dutiful son.

But on Saturday morning he received another telegram. “Sorry must postpone our spree together letter follows.”

He was beginning to wonder if his father really wanted to see him. It was a great jolt to his pride. He had counted upon letting the boys know where they lunched, what play they saw together, and perhaps there might be a few hairbreadth escapes to relate.

“He can’t come,” said Junior to his roommate, tearing up the telegram.

“Why can’t he?” asked Blackie. Did Blackie suspect anything? His parents never let anything prevent their seeing Blackie.

“Invited to the White House,” said Junior, tossing the torn telegram into the fire. “The President wants to consult him about conditions in Siberia.”

“Gee!” This made a sensation and it would spread. “But aren’t you going to see him at all?”

“Of course. Going down next week probably, but you know an invitation to the White House is a command.”

“That’s so.” Junior’s father’s stock was soaring.

That evening Smithy dropped in. He had heard about the White House and the President.

“Huh! I don’t believe you’ve got a father,” said Smithy.

Junior only smiled and glanced at his roommate. Later Blackie told the others that Smithy was jealous. “His father has nothing but money and fat.” Junior was always too much for Smithy. But suppose the promised letter did not follow. It hardly seemed possible. He had received occasional cables, several telegrams and that one notable wireless, but never in all his life a letter from his father.

It came promptly. It was brief and it was dictated, but it was a letter all the same, and he was much impressed. He had a letter from his father, like other fellows. It explained that the writer had been called away to New Mexico by important business, but that he hoped to join his son during the summer. “It’s time we got acquainted. With much love, Your Father.”

“Well, we’re going to meet during the summer anyway,” thought Junior, folding up the letter. And his father had sent his love. To be sure, he sent it through his secretary. But he sent it all the same.

That evening Junior arranged to be found casually reading a letter when the gang dropped in.

“What have you got?” asked Smithy.

“Oh, just a letter from my father,” remarked Junior casually. “Wants to know if I won’t go out to the Canadian Rockies with him next summer.” He seemed to keep on reading. It was a bulky letter apparently. Junior had attached three blank sheets of paper of the same size as that on which the note was written.

“Gee! Your old man writes you long ones,” said Smithy. “What’s it all about?”

“Oh, he merely wanted to tell me about his conference with the President.”

“Hot dog! Read it aloud.”

“Sorry, Smithy, but it’s confidential.” Folded in such a way that its brevity was concealed, Junior carelessly exposed the first sheet bearing his father’s engraved letterhead. “Confidential” had been written by pen across the top. Junior had written it.

All this produced the calculated effect for his father, but it was cold comfort for the son.

Well, he did see his father at last, but it was during the summer vacation, and the boys would know nothing about it until the fall term opened. Junior was staying with Aunt Mary in the country, and came in for the day. Phil was dictating letters and jumped up with a loud “Hello, there, hello!” And this time he kissed his son, right in front of his secretary. She was the only one of the three not startled. Phil and Junior both blushed.

“Mrs. Allison, this is Junior,” said Phil. He seemed to be really glad to see the boy, and Junior’s heart was thumping. Mrs. Allison said “Pleased to meet you,” but Junior liked her all the same. She looked kind. And while her employer finished his dictation she glanced at Junior and smiled. The letter progressed slowly and had to be changed twice. Mrs. Allison knew why, and smiled again, at her pencil this time. She understood them both better than they understood each other.

“Thank you, Mrs. Allison,” Phil said; “that will be all today. I’m too tired.” She knew he never tired. “I’ll sign them after lunch and mail them myself.” Then he turned to Junior. “Now you and I are going out to have a grand old time together, eh what, old top?”

He slapped Junior on the back. Then Mrs. Allison left the room, and father and son were alone together. It frightened them.

Already the old clamping habit of reserve was trying to have its way with them, though each was determined to prevent it. Both of them laughed and said “Well, well!” hoping to bluff it off.

“First, let’s have a look at you,” said Phil; and he playfully dragged Junior toward the window. The boy’s laughter suddenly died, and Phil now had a disquieting sense of making an ass of himself in his son’s eyes. But that was not it. Junior dreaded the strong light of the window. With his changing voice had arrived a few not very conspicuous pimples; such little ones, but they distressed him enormously.

“Well, feel as if you could eat something?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Junior. He feared it sounded cold and formal. He couldn’t help it.

They went to a club on the top of a high office building. Junior’s name was written in the guest book, which awed him agreeably. A large, luxurious luncheon was outlined by Phil, beginning with a cantaloupe and ending with ice cream — a double portion for Junior. This was first submitted to Junior for approval. He had forgotten his facial blemishes.

“Golly! You bet I approve,” said Junior laughing. That was more like it.

Phil summoned a waiter and then sent for the head waiter. A great man, his father, not afraid even of head waiters. And he ordered with the air of one who knew. No wonder the waiters seemed honored to serve him. Only, how was one to “get this over” to the boys without seeming to boast?

“A little fish, sir, after the melon?”

“Yes, if you’ll bring some not on the menu.” That was puzzling. Phil explained. Fish which had arrived at the club after the menu had been printed was sure to be fresh.

“Oh, I see,” said Junior. This would make a hit with the boys.

There was no doubt about it, his handsome father was the most distinguished personage in the whole large roomful of important-looking people. Several of them gathered around to welcome Phil. Junior was presented. Their greetings to the son showed their warm affection, their high regard for the father. Junior wallowed in filial pride. If only Smithy could see him now! What a father! A citizen of the world who did big things and wore perfect-fitting clothes, cut by his Bond Street tailor in London — the finishing touch of greatness to a boy of Junior’s age — and he recalled what one of the engineers had said to Aunt Mary, “Even in camp he shaves every day.”

“Well, tell me how everything is going at school,” said the father, who did not dream that he was being hero-worshiped.

But Junior could not be easy and natural, as with Aunt Mary. He blushed as in the presence of a stranger. He heard his own raucous voice and hated it. He took unnecessary sips of water.

He felt better and bolder after the delicious food arrived. Phil looked on with amusement, amazement at the amount the youngster consumed.

“Next year I hope you can find time to come down to see us at school,” Junior ventured with his double portion of ice cream. “All the fellows want to meet you.”

“I want to meet them,” said his father. “This fall on the way back, maybe.”

“Oh, you’re going away again?”

“Next week I’m going up into the woods with Billy Norton on a long canoe trip. Some new country I want to show him. Trout streams never yet fished by a white man.”

“Gosh! That’ll be great,” said Junior.

“Someday I’ll take you up there. It’s time you learned that game. Fly casting, like swinging a golf club, should begin before your muscles are set. Would you care to go on a camping trip with me?”

Care to! Of course it was the very thing he was doing all the time in his daydreams, but he could not say that to his father. He said “Yes, thanks,” and paused for another sip of water. “You wouldn’t — no, of course, you wouldn’t want me to go along this time.”

“Not this time. You see, I promised Billy. Someday though — you and I alone. Much better, don’t you think?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t call me sir! Makes me feel like a master. I’m your father.” They laughed at that and went back to the office. “Only take me a second to sign these letters,” said Phil. Junior looked at the neat pile of them, again impressed by his father’s importance.

“That’s awfully nice paper,” he said, coveting the engraved letterhead with his father’s name on it, which was also his name.

“If you like it, take some,” said Phil as he rapidly signed that name. “Help yourself, all you want. Wait, I’ll get you a whole box.” He touched a bell and a boy came in. “Get a box of my stationery and ship it to this address.” He turned to his letters again. “Then you won’t have to pack it all the afternoon.” Pack it? Oh, yes, out of doors men said “pack” instead of “carry.” He would say it hereafter.

On the way from the elevator, as they passed through the arcade, Junior stopped to gaze with admiration at a camera in a shop window.

“Like one of those?” asked Phil. He led the way in. “Take your pick,” he said. And then, “Ship it to this address.”

It was the only way this shy father knew how to express his affection. It was not easy to say much to this boy. He seemed keen and critical under his quiet manner.

Before the baseball game was over — a dull, unimportant game — they were both talked out, each wondering what was the matter. “I suppose I bore him,” said Phil to himself, and soon began thinking about his business. When their grand old time together was finished each felt a horrible sense of relief, though neither would acknowledge it to himself.

“Poor little cuss!” thought Phil. “I’d like to be a good father to him, but I don’t know how.”

And the boy: “I’m afraid he’s disappointed in me. I’m so skinny and have pimples.” If he were only a big, good-looking fellow like Smithy, who played on the football team, his father would be proud of him. Smithy’s parents saw him almost every week in term time and took him abroad every summer. They were having his portrait painted.

“What kind of a time did you have with your father in town?” asked his Aunt Mary. Junior felt rather in the way at times, now that she had a husband.

“Bully! Great!” and he made an attractive picture of it. “Father and I are so congenial, now that I’m old. Next summer we’re going to the woods together.”

“How do you talk to your kids?” Phil asked Bill Norton by the camp fire.

“I don’t talk to them. They aren’t interested in me except as a source of supply. New generation!”

“I’m crazy about my boy,” said Phil, “but I have an idea that he considers the old man a well-meaning ass. Funny thing; that little fellow is the only person in the world I’m afraid of.”

“No father really knows his own son,” said Billy. “Some of them think they do, but they don’t. It’s a psychological impossibility.”

Back at school again. A quick, scudding year. Summer vacation approaching already!

“We’d be so pleased if you would spend the month of August with us in Maine,” wrote Blackie’s mother. She had grown fond of the boy and was sorry for him. Motherless — fatherless, too, for practical, for parental purposes.

Junior, with his preternatural quickness, knew she was sorry for him and appreciated her kindness, but he was not to be pitied and his father was not to be criticized. “That’s awfully good of you,” he replied, “but father is counting upon my going up to the North Woods with him on a long canoe trip. Some new country where no other white man has ever been.”

He went to the woods, but not with his father. It was the school camp — not the wild country his father penetrated; but there was trout fishing all the same, and he loved it. Like many boys who are not proficient at athletics, he took to camp life like a savage and developed more expertness at casting and cooking and canoeing than did certain stars of the football field or track. He had natural savvy. The guides said so. Besides, he had an incentive to excel. He was not going to be a nuisance to his father on the trip they would take together some day. And though he reverted to a state of savagery in the woods, he kept his tent and his outfit scrupulously neat and won first prize in this department by a vote of the counselors. For excellent reasons he did not shave every day in camp, but he would someday.

He learned a great deal about the ways of birds while he was in the woods, and back at school he persuaded Blackie to help organize The Naturalists Club, despite the jeers of the athlete idolaters. He took many bird pictures with the camera and he prepared a bird census of the township. This was published in the school magazine, and so Junior decided that when he got through college he would be a writer.

He had not seen his father for two years. South America this time — in the Andes. The canoe trip was no longer mentioned. Junior went to the school camp regularly now. He was acknowledged the best all-round camper in school. He won first prize in fly casting and the second in canoeing. He was getting big and strong, and became a good swimmer.

He spent his Christmas vacation with Aunt Mary, and while there Mrs. Fielding, the wife of the housemaster, in town for the holidays, dropped in for tea one day with Aunt Mary. They did not know that Junior was in the adjoining room, reading Stewart Edward White.

“But it’s criminal the way Phil neglects that darling boy,” said Aunt Mary.

“And he’s developing in such a fine way too,” said Mrs. Fielding. “He’s one of the best liked boys in school.”

“I can’t understand my brother. Of course he’s terribly engrossed with his career, now that he has won success, but he might at least send a picture post card occasionally.”

“You mean to say he never writes to his own son!” Mrs. Fielding was shocked and indignant. And then came this tragic revelation to Junior:

“Well, you see,” said Aunt Mary, “Phil never wanted children, and he’s not really interested in the boy.”

“You don’t tell me so! Why, Aleck always speaks of your brother as if he were so generous and warm-hearted.”

“Yes, that’s what makes it so pathetic. He is kind and tries to make up for his lack of affection by giving Junior a larger allowance than is good for him. But he never takes the trouble to send him a Christmas present.”

So that explained it all. “He’s not interested in me. I wasn’t wanted.” And after that he had his first experience with a sleepless night.

A few days later Junior remarked, “By the way, Aunt Mary, did I show you the binoculars father sent me for Christmas?” He handed them to her for inspection. They looked secondhand. They were. He had picked them up that morning in a pawnshop. “These are the very ones that father carried all through the war. He knew I’d like them better than new ones. Just like father to think of that. You remember his showing them to us when he got back?”

Aunt Mary did not remember such things — he knew she wouldn’t — but she rejoiced to hear it.

“He has sent me a typewriter too; only he ordered it shipped directly to school.”

“That was nice of him, wasn’t it?” said Aunt Mary.

“That’s the way he does with most of the presents he sends me. You remember the camera?”

She did remember the camera.

The typewriter had been ordered on the installment plan. Junior hadn’t saved enough money from his allowance to buy it outright.

“He’s not going to get me a radio set until he finds out which is the best make on the market, he says.”

“Oh, has he written to you?” Aunt Mary was still more surprised.

“Every week,” said Junior.

“Oh, Junior! I’m so glad. But why haven’t you ever told me, dear?”

Junior smiled. “I didn’t want to make you jealous. He never writes to you.”

“But didn’t you know how I would want to hear all his news?”

“You are so terribly engrossed in Uncle Robert’s career, I thought maybe you weren’t interested in father.”

At school the binoculars made a hit with the boys because they showed the scars of war, but no one thought much of typewriters as Christmas presents except Junior. He knew what he was doing.

A few days later, when Blackie entered the room he found his roommate engrossed in reading a letter and so said nothing until Junior emitted an absent-minded chuckle.

“What’s the joke?”

“Oh, nothing; just a letter from my father.”

“From your father? I thought he never wrote to you.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Well, I never see any envelopes with foreign stamps.”

“He always incloses mine in letters to my aunt.”

“But you never mentioned them, all the same,” said Blackie, “except the one about the White House.”

“They are confidential, mostly.” Junior returned to the absorbing letter. Presently he laughed outright.

“What does he say that’s so funny?”

“Oh, hell! Read it yourself.” Junior seemed irritated and tossed the bulky letter across to his roommate.

It had taken the boy some time to compose this letter to himself, for it required more than the possession of a typewriter and his father’s engraved stationery to create a convincing illusion of a letter from a father. Junior had seen so few, except for those Blackie had allowed him to read, that he had no working model for long, interesting letters worthy of a great man like his father.

The first draft had begun “My darling boy,” but he changed that — it sounded too much like Blackie’s mother. He made it “My dearest son.” He rather fancied that, but finally played safe and addressed himself simply as “Dear Junior.”

My work here is going fine. I have three thousand natives at work under me not to speak of a hundred engineers on my staff doing the technikal work. I am terribly busy but of course won’t let that interfere with my regular weekly letter to you.

Junior was watching Blackie’s face.

I often think of the last canoe trip with you in Canada and can hardly wait until I take another canoe trip with you in Canada. Rember that time you hooked a four-pounder with your three ounce rod? You were a little fellow then, that was before you went away to school. Rember how you yelled to me for help to land same?

Business men always said “same,” but Junior didn’t like it, and besides, his father was a professional man, so he changed “same” to “him.”

Of course it wasn’t much of a trick for me to land that four pound trout on a three ounce rod, because I am probly the best fisherman in any of the dozen or more fishing clubs I belong to.

Junior revised that to read:

Because I happen to have quite a little experience landing trout and salmon in some of the most important streams in the world, from the high Sierras to the Ural Mountains.

It would never do to make his father guilty of blowing — the unforgivable sin.

He thought that was all right for a beginning, but did not know how to follow it up. He wanted to put in something about the Andes, with a few stories of wild adventure and hairbreadth escapes, but although he read up on the Andes in the encyclopedia, as he did on all his father’s temporary habitats, he did not feel that the encyclopedia’s style suited his father’s vivid personality. In an old copy of the National Geographic Magazine he found a traveler’s description of adventures in that part of the world, and simply copied a page or two. It had to do with an amusing though extremely dangerous adventure with a python, which had treed one of the writer’s gun bearers — a narrow escape told as a joke — quite his father’s sort of thing; and no one would ever accuse Junior of inventing such a well-written narrative with such circumstantial local color.

Blackie was properly impressed by the three thousand natives and one hundred experts, and he, too, laughed aloud at the antics of the gun bearer. He told the other boys about it, as Junior meant him to do, and some of them wanted to read it too. They dropped in after study hour.

Junior, it seems, required urging, like an amateur vocalist who nevertheless has brought her music.

“Oh, shoot!” he said. “It doesn’t amount to anything. Just a letter from my father.”

“Why don’t you read it aloud?” suggested Blackie.

Junior seemed bored, but soon submitted. Like vocalists, he was afraid that they might stop urging him.

“Oh, very well,” he said. He skimmed lightly over the opening personal paragraph with the parenthetical voice people use when leading up to the important part of a letter, though this was a very important part for Junior, to get it over. Then, with the manner of saying “Ah, here we are,” he began reading in a louder and more deliberate tone, but not without realistic hesitation here and there, as if unfamiliar with the text. He read not only the amusing adventure with the python, but an authoritative paragraph on the mineral deposits of the mountains. So his audience never doubted that he had a real letter from a real mining expert who signed himself “Your affectionate friend and father.”

Junior carelessly tossed the letter upon the table. “Someday I’ll read you one of his interesting ones,” he said.

“Do it now,” said one of his admirers. “It’s great stuff.”

“No, I never keep letters,” said Junior and, to prove it, tore up the carefully prepared document and tossed it in the fire.

“I’ll let you know when I get a good one.”

This was so successful that he did it again. There were plenty of other quotable pages in the same magazine article, and Junior had a whole box of his father’s stationery. But at the beginning and end of each letter Junior always insinuated a few paternal touches, suggesting a rich past of intimacy and affection, though just to make it a little more convincing he would occasionally insert something like this, “But I must tell you frankly, as man to man, that you spent entirely too much money last term,” and interrupted his reading to say, “Gee! I didn’t mean to read you fellows that part.” And they all laughed. A touch of parental nature that made all the boys akin.

The fame of these letters spread from the boys’ end of the dinner table to the master’s. Mrs. Fielding said to Junior one day, “I’m so glad your father has been writing to you lately.”

“Lately? Why, he always writes to me. But don’t tell my Aunt Mary. Might make her jealous.”

Junior smiled as if he had a great joke on his Aunt Mary. There, he got that over too! Neither of these ladies would dare criticize his father again.

“Is your Aunt Mary so fond of him as all that?”

“Why, of course!”

“Well, I’m glad you’re hearing from him, anyway. I so seldom see letters addressed to you on the hall table.”

“I have a lock box at the post office.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Fielding.

So that explained it all. It was true about the lock box. Junior exhibited the key while he was speaking, and he was seen at the post office frequently to make the matter more plausible. He even opened the box if anyone was around to watch him, though he never found any letters there except those he put in and pulled out again by sleight of hand, whistling carelessly as he did so.

Mr. Fielding had asked Junior to step into the office a moment. “What do you hear from your father?” he said.

“Oh, he’s quite well, thank you, sir. He’ll be starting for home soon. He says he’s not going to let anything interfere with our canoe trip this year. It’s the funniest thing how something has always happened every summer to prevent it. Father says we’re going to break the hoodoo this time.”

“I see,” said Mr. Fielding.

Junior had heard Mr. Fielding say “I see” before, and he had been in school too long now to undervalue its significance. He would have to be on guard. He knew he had told conflicting stories.

“Do you hear from him regularly?”

“Oh, no; the mails are so irregular from that part of the world.”

“How often?”

“Well,” said Junior, with his engaging smile, “not so often as I’d like, of course. But then he’s a very busy man.”

“That story about the python — it sounded like a corker as Blackie told it secondhand. Mind letting me read that letter?”

“Sorry, sir. I destroyed it.” Blackie would vouch for that, if necessary.

“I see.” The head master looked at Junior in silence, then he said with a not unkind smile, “Junior, I’m very fond of your father. He’s one of the finest fellows that ever lived.”

“Sure,” said Junior.

“I’ve known him longer than you have. I don’t think he ever did anything dishonorable in his life.”

“Of course not.”

What was coming? He must keep his head now.

“You know how your father would feel if I couldn’t honestly say the same thing about you?”

“Why, what do you mean, Mr. Fielding? “

“Just tell me the truth, Junior, and it needn’t ever go out of this room. Does your father ever write to you at all?”

“Why, sir, you don’t think my father is the sort who wouldn’t write to his own son, do you?” Then the boy added desperately, “I don’t see why you all want to make him out a piker.”

“Did your father write the letter describing the fight with the python?”

“Look here, Mr. Fielding, you people don’t understand. I’m better friends with my father than most boys. You see, my mother’s dead and all that. So — well, don’t you see, he sort of takes it out in writing me long letters. He thought that stuff about the python would amuse me.”

He was a loyal little liar and the headmaster admired him for it. But it wouldn’t do. Mr. Fielding opened a drawer of his desk and took out an old magazine.

“Does your father take the National Geographic?”

Junior crumpled up.

“I don’t know, sir.” He was in for it now — caught. Mr. Fielding opened the magazine and pointed out a marked page to Junior.

“Junior, I know you won’t accuse an honorable gentleman like your father of stealing another man’s writings, passing them off as his own. There’s an ugly name for that. It’s called plagiarism.”

He had tried to defend his father, and look at the result!

“I wrote those letters, Mr. Fielding.”

“I knew that,” said Mr. Fielding gently. “You won’t do it again, though, will you, Junior?”

“Hardly.”

“That’s all. You may go now.”

Junior turned at the door. He knew that this was not all. He was being let down too easily.

“Mr. Fielding — ” he began, and hesitated. “It won’t be necessary for you to tell my father, will it?”

“I won’t tell him, but you will.”

“No, sir, I could never do that.”

“Well, we’ll see. Good night, Junior.”

So he could write no more letters to exhibit to the boys. He explained that his father had gone on a long expedition inland. No chance for mail for months. They made no comment, but the whole house knew that he had been summoned “to the office.” They suspected something, but they would never discover the truth from him. He would bluff it out to the end.

But now, more than ever, he wanted letters from father, even if written by himself. He had formed the habit. They somehow did him good. They made him feel that his father was interested in him.

So, once in a while, just for his own eyes, when Blackie was not around he opened the typewriter and said all the things he wanted his father to say to him. As no one would ever see these letters, he could go as far as he liked. He went quite far. He even said things that only mothers said:

My darling son: Don’t you care what he thinks about you; I understand and I forgive you. You meant it all right and I like you just the same, even if you are not an athlete and have got pimples. When I get back we’ll go off to the West together and live down this disgrace. Your devoted father and friend.

Sometimes he laughed a little, or tried to, when he realized how these letters would bore his distinguished parent. But while writing them his father seemed not only fond of him but actually proud of him. A writer can invent anything:

I was so pleased to hear your poem about the meadow lark was accepted by the magazine. Your article about Birds in Our Woods was very interesting and very well written. I believe you will make a great writer someday, and think how proud I will be when you are a great writer, and people point to your picture in the newspapers! I’ll say, “That’s my son; I’m his father.” Of course, I was disappointed that you did not become a great athlete like me, but intellectual destinction is good if you cant get athletic destinction, and it may be more useful for a career.

He got a good deal of comfort out of being a father to himself, and sometimes the letters ran into considerable length, unless Blackie butted in. His father, it seemed, even consulted him about his own affairs:

I am glad you aprove of my taking on the San Miguel project. I think a great deal of your business judgment and it is great to have a son who has good business judgment even though he cannot make the team. In that respect it is better than making the team, because you can help me in my problems away off here just as I help you with your problems up there at school.

He enjoyed writing that one, but when he became the reader of it, that last sentence made him cry. And the worst of it was, at that point Blackie came in.

“What are you writing?”

“Just some stuff for the mag.”

“You’re always writing for the mag. Get your racket and come on.”

“Oh, get out of here and quit interrupting my literary work.” Junior had not dared to turn his tell-tale face towards his roommate.

The school year was closing, and Junior was packing to leave the next day. The last time he had gone to town he learned at the office that his father was returning soon. They did not know which steamer. They never did. The secret letters had all been kept carefully locked in his trunk, and now Junior was taking them out to put neatly folded trousers in the bottom. Blackie was playing tennis. None of the boys had learned the truth, though in secret Blackie felt pretty sure of it now, but was so loyal that he had a fight with Smithy for daring to say in public that Junior’s letters were a damn fake.

Mr. Fielding came in. He did not notice the letters lying there on the table, and he seemed very friendly. The housemaster knew how fine and sensitive this boy was and that the only way to handle him was by encouragement.  We are all much pleased with your classroom work, Junior; but as for the mag, you’re a rotten speller, but a good writer, and I don’t mind telling you a secret: You have been elected to be one of the editors next year.”

“Oh, Mr. Fielding! Are you sure?” This had been his ambition for a year. That settled it for life. A great writer like W.H. Hudson, who loved both nature and art, but nature more.

“Of course your appointment has to be confirmed by the faculty, but there’ll be no trouble with a boy of your standing. All you have to do is straighten out that little matter with your father. Naturally, an editor has got to have a clean literary record.”

This was not meant entirely as punishment for Junior. The master thought it would be salutary for Phil to know. It might wake him up.

“You mean, I can’t make the mag unless I tell him what I did?”

“Do you want me to tell him?”

“If you do I’ll run away and I’ll never come back.”

“Can’t you get up your courage to do it, Junior? I know you didn’t mean to do wrong. Your father will, too, when he understands.”

Junior was shaking his head.

“It isn’t a matter of courage,” he said, straightening up. “He’d think I was knocking him out for not writing to me.”

“Well, if you won’t talk to him about it I must. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“A few minutes! Here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He landed yesterday. The papers ran an interview with him this morning. I telegraphed him to come at once.” Mr. Fielding looked at his watch. “Why, his train must be coming in now. Excuse me. I said I’d meet him at the station.”

A mental earthquake turned Junior’s universe upside down. His father was coming at last! Why? His offense must have been pretty serious to bring his father. Why, of course! Mr. Fielding had sent for him. The most honorable gentleman in the world was going to find out in a few minutes that his own son and namesake was a liar, a plagiarist and a forger. Junior could not face it. He rushed from the room and out by the back stairs. His father was coming, the thing he planned and longed for ever since he had been a member of the school, and he was running away from him.

He went out into the woods by the river, where he had spent so many happy hours with Blackie and the birds. He could never face Blackie again, nor the school, no, nor his father. Life was empty and horrible. “Why not end it all in the river?” He had read that phrase, but the impulse was genuine.

“The hell of it is,” he heard himself saying, “I’m such a good swimmer.” But he could load his coat with stones and bind his feet with his trousers. He began picking out the stones.

“Well, what is it?” said Phil to the housemaster, trying to hide his paternal eagerness. The boy was in trouble, the old man would get him out. Good! Needed at last. “Has my young hopeful been getting tight?”

“Oh, nothing as serious as that. He’s a finely organized, highly evolved youngster, and so he has a rather vivid imagination.”

“Speak up, Aleck! You haven’t caught him in a lie? That’s a good deal more serious than getting tight.”

“Well, it’s a likable lie.”

“It’s a lie all the same, and I’ll give him the devil.”

“Oh no, you won’t. The kid lied for you, old man; perjured himself like a gentleman. Now you go and get it out of him. It’ll do you both good.” They had arrived at the house.

“Where is the little cuss?” Phil was trying without success to seem calm and casual.

“He’s no longer little. You won’t know him. He’s come into his heritage of good looks at last.”

“For God’s sake, shut up and tell me where to find him.”

Fielding laughed. “Upstairs, second door on the left. I won’t butt in on this business. It’s up to you now.” But Phil did not wait to hear all that.

Not finding his namesake and glancing about at the intimate possessions of his little-known son, Phil was surprised to see a sheath of letters on the table, bearing his own engraved stamp at the top.

“That’s odd,” he thought. “Who’s been writing to him on my paper?” He had forgotten the presentation box of stationery. His eye was caught by these words neatly typed, “My beloved son.” At the bottom of the page he saw, “Your faithful friend and father.” He picked the letter up and read it.

As I told you in my last, I am counting the days until we get together again and go up to Canada on another canoe trip, just you and I alone this time without any guide. You have become such a good camper now that we don’t want any greasy Indian guides around. I am glad that you are a good camper. I don’t care what you say, I’d rather go to the woods with you than Billy Norton or anybody because you and I are not like ordinary father and sons; we are congenial friends. Of course you are pretty young to be a friend of mine and you may be an ugly and unattractive kid, but you are mine all the same, and I’m just crazy about you. They say I neglect you, but you know better. All these letters prove it. Your faithful friend and father.

Junior’s father picked up the rest of the letters and, with the strangest sensations a father ever had, read them all.

Perhaps it was telepathy. Junior suddenly remembered that he had left the letters exposed upon the table. His father would go upstairs after the talk with Mr. Fielding, to disown him. He would find those incriminating letters. Then when they found his body his father would know that his son was not only a liar and a forger but a coward and a quitter. In all his life his father had never been afraid of anything. If his father were in his place what would he do?

That saved him. He dumped out the stones and ran. back to the room. He would face it.

Phil was aware that a tall slender youth with a quick elastic stride had entered the room and had stopped abruptly by the door, staring at him. There were reasons why he preferred not to raise his face at present, but this boy’s figure was unrecognizably tall and strong, and Phil was in no mood to let a young stranger come in upon him now.

“What do you want?” he asked gruffly, still seated, still holding the letters.

There was no answer. Junior had never seen a father disown a son, but he guessed that was the way it was done. He saw the letters in his father’s hands. Certainly, this was being disowned.

The boy took a step forward. “Well, anyway,” he said, maintaining a defiant dignity in his disgrace, “no one else has seen those letters, so you won’t be compromised, father.” The boy was a great reader, and had often heard of compromising letters.

Phil sprang up from his chair, dropped the letters and gazed into the fine sensitive face, a beautiful face, it seemed to him now, quivering, but held bravely up to meet his sentence like a soldier.

Junior could now see that his father’s strong face was also quivering, but misunderstood the reason for his emotion. There was a silence while Phil gained control of his voice. Then he said, still gazing at the boy, “But how did you know I felt that way about you?”

“What way?”

“Those letters. I’ve read them. I wish to God I’d written them.”

Junior, usually so quick, still could not get it right. “You mean you’re going to forgive me for lying about you?”

“Lying about me! Why, boy, you’ve told the truth about me. I didn’t know how. Can you forgive me for that?”

Now Junior was getting it. His face was lighting up. “Why, father,” he began, and faltered. “Why, father — why, father — you really like me!”

Junior felt strong hands gripping his shoulders and once more the vivid recollection of the street boys and the big man who comforted him. “You know what one of those letters says, Junior — I’m just crazy about you.”

“Oh, father, why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“Well, what’s the use of having a great writer in the family anyway!”

They laughed and looked at each other and found that the strange thing that kept them apart was gone forever. In the future they might differ, quarrel even, but the veil between them was torn asunder at last.

The rest of the boys had finished dinner when Junior came down, leading in his tall bronzed father with the perfectly fitting clothes and the romantic scar on his handsome face.

“Say, fellows, wait a minute. I want you to know my father.” He did it quite as if accustomed to it, but Mrs. Fielding down at the end of the table could see that father and son both were reeking with pride. “He’s my son; I’m his father.”

“So this is Blackie?” said Phil. “Did you give him that message in my last letter?” Even his father could lie when he wanted to.

“Sorry, I forgot.”

Phil turned and gave his old classmate a shameless wink. “I can’t really blame the kid. I write him such awfully long letters.”

“Father just landed from South America yesterday,” Junior was explaining to Smithy. “So he hurried right up here.”

“You see we’re starting for the Canadian Rockies tomorrow,” said Phil. “This fellow’s got an impudent idea that he can out-cast the old man now, but I’ll show him his place.”

Mr. Fielding took the floor. “Junior ought to get some good material for the magazine up there,” he said. “Boys, he’s going to be one of the editors next year.”

“Breakup” by Frances Ensign Greene

Frances Ensign Greene wrote several short stories for Redbook and The Saturday Evening Post. His short story Breakup reflects the life of a young woman who makes countless sacrifices for her family and career.

Published on October 27, 1956. Want even more classic fiction? Subscribe to the magazine for access to our complete archives, including fiction, cartoons, art, inspiring stories, humor, and in-depth reporting.

Although this is the story of a successful and happy woman, it has a strange ending, one that disturbs and delights me by turns. Actually, of course, nobody’s story can be over until his life is over, and Mary Jordan, by her own admission, is just thirty-four. I never heard of anybody doing just what she did, and probably that’s what disturbs me, but there is an undeniable pleasure in seeing someone slip out of the neat little pattern of expected behavior in order to be true to himself, and that’s what delights me. But I’d like to know what you think of the debt she incurred, and the rare way she paid it.

I first met Mary Jordan at a cocktail party, one of those deadly ones from five to seven where people come at eight and stay until eleven, milling around with drinks in their hands and being veddy, veddy smart and a little hysterical.

There was the usual count, who asked to be called Gigi because, after all, this was a democratic country; the wife of a very great actor and her mother; an overblown torch singer fast making a fool of herself; a couple of television writers and several producers; a portrait painter of great charm. And there were about twenty others, all of whom were somebody too.

There was also a very beautiful woman sitting on a couch talking to the painter. I recognized her at once — so would you have. She is as far up as she can go in her profession, which may account for the little shadow around her eyes; unless you remain static when you get to the top the only possible movement is down. But her beauty is legendary, and she has probably made a fortune, so there was no occasion for sympathy.

She had on a black-and-white creation that made her look like a gorgeous, gentle Cossack. I went over and spoke to the painter, who introduced us and then went in search of another drink, so I sat down beside the beautiful Mary Jordan and we began to talk, and it was as simple as that. I liked her suddenly — you know how it is. You meet someone you have never seen before, realize that you are in tune with each other, and a fully matured liking springs from you like Minerva from Jupiter’s head. Other people came and went, but doggedly we kept on.

After a bit, she said, “Straight ginger ale on an empty stomach is beginning to get me. I could do with some food, couldn’t you?”

We found our hostess, and there was something of a struggle with words — she’d wanted Mary Jordan to sing for the people, but while Miss Jordan was charming about it, she was definite. My heart warmed to her.

There was a restaurant just around the corner, and we went in and ordered scrambled eggs. I sat there beaming; it was fun being with someone who was as easily recognized as a movie star. As a matter of fact, she’s made several pictures, been in television for the last five years, and, heaven knows, her photographs have been in the papers often enough. People nudged one another and stared, but she seemed unconscious of it.

She leaned forward, her gray eyes slanting. “You have amazing bits of information,” she said. “I read something of yours once in which you said the best maple sap came from trees that had a layer of slate under them. How did you know that?”

“Oh, I probably heard it years ago and dragged it out of my subconscious. Just a whiff of a thought.” I was almost shocked that she remembered careless words I’d written and had forgotten myself.

“I see. You assimilate things and file them away for future use — everything you hear and see. But that’s such a load. Aren’t you awfully tired?”

I smiled at her. “Thanks for understanding that. But it’s not a conscious tiredness. It’s just a cageful of mice scurrying about in the noodle. I know smatterings about a lot of things, and I can’t add up a column of figures — and why did you remember that about the maple trees?”

“Because I came from Vermont. We had a stand of maples with slate under it, just as you said in your story. I always helped in the bush during the sugaring, along with the rest of the family. If you’ve never dipped a ladle into boiling syrup in the sugar bush, poured some onto fresh snow and popped it into your mouth while it was still warm and waxy — then, my friend, you haven’t lived.”

I’d about exhausted my own sketchy knowledge of the maple industry, SO I said, “I’d supposed you were a velvet child who wintered at Cap d’Antibes. That voice must have been mellowed by Mediterranean warmth, surely. And now you tell me Vermont, of all places. Deep snow, stags bounding on the hillsides, wood-burning stoves and grim, hard-bitten people — ”

A curious change came over her face, and it stopped me. “You do know smatterings, don’t you? The thumb-nail sketch was hardly accurate. For example, the least hard-bitten person I’ve ever known still lives there, the woman I love in a very special way, and the one I’ve tried to repay — and not just with money, but with — Will you let me tell you about it sometime? I need to talk to someone.” And in that moment I realized that Mary Jordan was lonely.

Two weeks later I called her and she asked me to come to see her. She had a smart apartment in the Sixties — all the things you’d expect, gray walls, a fireplace, good paintings, low squatty chairs, and a grand piano. We sat down opposite each other, and after a little while Mary Jordan began to tell me the story that she knew I had come for.

Mabel Kelsey was a large, handsome woman who rarely sat down from sunup to sundown, except on Sundays. Righteous and proudly God-fearing, she had married Carl Kelsey to reform him, so she said. She seemed to have succeeded in her project, for Carl Kelsey turned into a morose man who seldom talked. They produced two sons, Matt and Joel, two years apart, and then in her fortieth year, Mabel gave birth to a girl child — a feat of which she was always slightly ashamed.

The boys, then ten and twelve, were given the privilege of naming the infant, and they called her Ramona, after the sword swallower they’d seen at the county fair. Ramona Kelsey.

All through her childhood, the boys kept up their proprietary interest in Mona, teasing her, loving and coddling her, and disciplining her by turns, so that she was in a perpetual state of confusion. She loved her brothers more than anything else on earth. The silent Carl and the indifferent Mabel were dim shadows on the screen of her youthful development. Only the boys were real. She loved the smell of their room up under the eaves, the wild gaminess of it, the ghost of forbidden smoke, old corduroy and water-soaked leather that had dried there. Often she’d go into their room on Sunday mornings when they were allowed to sleep a little longer, and crawl into bed between them.

Joel would open one blue eye and look fierce. “Hey you, Matt. That thing got in again. What’ll we do with it?” “Heave it outside.”

So they’d get up, and one would take her feet and the other her arms, and they’d swing her, and just as they seemed bent on pitching her through the open window, one of them would stop to scratch his ankle, and she’d light into them, punching into their rock-ribbed stomachs, knowing she could never hurt them, and they’d all capsize on the floor in a laughing, crazy heap. They were a wonderful pair of brothers for a little girl to own.

And then, when she was nine, the tragedy had happened. The boys had gone up the mountain after a marauding bear, and Joel slipped and fell from a rock ledge, a drop of forty feet. He said he wasn’t hurt, and they believed him, but the next morning when Mona got into bed with them, Joel’s eyes were already open and he was cold against her body. She was never to forget Matt’s scream when she woke him, or the dreadful contortions of his face. Matt was never quite the same after Joel’s death or, for that matter, neither was Mona.

Matt worked the farm alone, studying his agriculture bulletins under the hanging kerosene lamp, going up to his lonely room at night to remember Joel’s laughter. The household was silent, sullen. It worked and ate and slept, and that was all. But it was about this time that Mona, alone and under the open sky, began to sing as a protest against the weighing hush that surrounded her.

One autumn day Matt went into St. Johnsbury and brought home a bride. His mother met them at the door, her eyes blazing at Matt and ignoring the girl. Only the anger leaped between them in place of words, for Matt had nothing to say, either, no explanations and no apologies. His wife was a little thing, frail and ash blond, with blue eyes and beautiful narrow hands, and a sweetness in her face. Mona’s heart opened wide with that first beseeching smile. She wanted to protect her, and, more importantly, she wanted to do something to make her happy. That desire never left her.

The next day Mabel Kelsey cornered Matt in the kitchen. “Well, now, this is a pretty thing you’ve done,” she said tauntingly. “If you had to bring a woman here, why didn’t you pick a fit one to help in the house and bear you some children? Look at you! Six foot two and shoulders on you like an ox! Why, a young’un of yours’d kill this scrawny whiffet you’ve drug in!”

A flush spread over his face as he laid down his fork. “I love her, ma. If you can’t be decent to her, don’t talk.”

“You leave her alone, ma.” Mona was standing with her feet planted wide apart, defying her mother for the first time in her life. “She don’t have to help in the house — I’ll do it for her. We’ll take care of her, Matt and me!”

Rosalie spoke from the doorway before they knew she was there, and she smiled in quiet friendship at the little girl. “Thank you, Mona. As long as I have you and Matt, I won’t care about anything else — too much.”

And then she crossed the room and sat down in her rightful place beside her husband at the kitchen table. From that time on, she and Mabel never spoke directly to each other. For twelve years they lived in the same house and never found the need for words together until a grave wonder united them.

Mabel’s prophecy came true; there were no children. Once it seemed as if there might be, but Rosalie caught her foot in the torn drugget and fell down the steep stairs that led from the room up under the eaves. Sure enough, Matt’s child almost killed her, and there followed a long period of invalidism, with Mona waiting on her, and Mona alone hearing the heartbroken weeping when the doctor told her there would never be a child now. She had wanted a baby more than anything else in the world.

By this time the ineffectual Carl Kelsey was dead, making little difference in the lives of any of them. Mona was fourteen, a strong, straight girl blooming into sudden beauty. Rosalie taught her many things, but most of all she gave her an appreciation of herself. It was Rosalie who made her sing a song over and over again until the tightness went out of her throat and the clear rich soprano came free and sweet, and it was also Rosalie who told her that her singing was a very special gift which might become an art if she worked at it.

As the years went by, Mona Kelsey grew locally famous. Folks said something ought to be done about that beautiful voice, but they didn’t suggest what — or how.

On a Sunday afternoon in May when the apple orchard was deep in bloom, the girls sat under one of the flowering trees with Matt sprawled beside them. That was the time when Rosalie chose to speak to her husband about the dream she and Mona had shared. “There’s a man in Dorset,” she told him, “who will see to it that Mona gets a scholarship to a fine music school in New York City if we can manage the rest of it, Matt. He says she has a remarkable voice and it ought to be trained.”

Matt looked off to the green hills in the distance. Then he asked heavily, “How much would it cost?”

“The way we figure, she ought to have twenty-five dollars a week. I could make some clothes for her this summer, but she’d need other things, and carfare and stamp money and odds and ends — ”

“Honey, you might as well ask for the moon. That’s plain crazy, and you know it. Twenty-five dollars — holy Hannah!”

Mona stiffened. “Ma’s got that thirty- acre piece that’s just lying there, and the Sandersons want it. Couldn’t she sell it and give me the money? I’d pay it back. I’m not asking this just for myself, but this man who comes to Dorset summers, this Mr. Caldwell, says God gave me my voice, and I’ve got a debt to Him!”

“God or no God, ma wouldn’t give up her thirty acres to educate any girl, and I don’t know as I’d blame her. You’d get married, and the money spent on you’d be just wasted.”

“I wouldn’t either get married! Not for years, not till I’d done what the Lord intended me to do. Matt, I’ve got to amount to something! I can’t just stay here and — Rosy, you tell him.”

“The money would never be wasted, Matt. She’d feel her obligation.”

“Obligation, hell. What woman thinks of obligation when she meets some fellow she wants to tie up with? Look at you. Your folks scrimped to send you to normal school, and what good did it do you? You married me and buried yourself alive.” Then Matt, the kind and gentle man, said the cruel thing out of his deep shame and frustration. “It might have been different if we’d had kids — being educated, you’d know how to tend them better, teach them things. But as it is, you’re just wasted, Rosy. Your life don’t mean a thing.”

Rosalie turned as white as the dress she wore, as white as the snow that had lain over her heart since she lost her child.

When she could speak again, she said softly, “I suppose you’re right. But there’s a way to change that.”

After she had gone to the house, Mona looked full at her brother. She was too young to find the words that would have smashed him and shamed him. They were all in her eyes, and her eyes only bewildered him.

He said, “Well, I’ll speak to ma, anyway. It won’t do any harm, I guess.”

“You’ve done the harm. There isn’t any more to do.”

He was a male creature, and to him the ways of females would be forever mysterious, so he was never to know that his crudeness marked the turning point in the lives of two women.

Mona received the scholarship in July, and in the middle of August, Rosalie went to work in the post office. Already the clothes Mona would need had been made, and twenty of the twenty-five dollars had been assured. Rosalie was a woman fired now by a high purpose, and her fading face showed it.

Mabel Kelsey had nothing but scorn. What Mona did about her fool singing was no concern of hers, and if a dim- witted woman wanted to walk two miles to a job and back again, and waste her money to boot, let her. But Matt pledged ten dollars to add to his wife’s twenty, and so Mona was cared for.

It was a year before Mona came home again, but in the meantime there were the letters that meant so much to Rosalie. Vicariously, this was her own training, since she was in a measure responsible for it, and she followed the pruning of Mona’s voice through her letters. Her vocal coach was Gerald Chapman, and he told her that she showed more promise than any student he’d had in the last five years. “Think of that, Rosy! I wouldn’t tell you, except that you’re the only one in the world who cares, and I think maybe you’ll be a little bit proud.”

The tales that Mona wrote home were not precisely true. She was doing well in all her studies, and her voice was growing more facile by the day, but there were times when even Chapman’s pat of approbation couldn’t lift the fog she groped in. She was homesick for the hills she knew, for Rosalie and Matt; she was lonely to the point of illness and she was afraid.

That first year she ate her Christmas dinner at a midtown restaurant with a young artist named Philip Garfield, who was just getting over a bout with pneumonia and seemed as homeless as she was. Though he was strangely attractive, he was unlike any man she had ever known, and so she resented him; he seemed to her the embodiment of all her griefs and frustrations of the moment.

Two years later she had married him with no thought of her obligation to Rosalie or her own ambitions. She had married him because she couldn’t do anything else.

It was a magic thing that had burgeoned within her when spring came that year. Constantly she sang of love, and she was surrounded by the foreign coaches who spoke lustily and warmly. By that time, she was studying with the famous old diva, Maria Campagni, and madame often told her, “You will not really be a singer, my little pet, until you live a little, love very much, and suffer some because you love. You need a man to take you in his arms and make you forget that cold Vair-mont you come from.”

And Mona, thinking of the little man who had enriched madame’s emotions and had thus been responsible for her glorious years at La Scala, would giggle. But they weren’t all like little bandy-legged Luigi Campagni. She began to wonder how it would be to have Philip Garfield make love to her. She was young, and he was so very much in love with her, and this new, strange thing she couldn’t understand was flowering within her.

Philip was a painter, and a good one, his friends told her. He would have real significance someday, if he got the breaks.

Sometimes madame would rap sharply before she could get Mona’s attention. Finally, a light broke over the huge face. “Aa-hanh! Now I know. You are in love. At last it has happened to my little frozen chicken, and she is thawing and it is very painful, no? It is, of course, the beautiful young man who paints? Oh, I am not so glad about anything in years! Now you will sing!”

“Will I, madame?” That seemed of small importance to her at the moment. “But what will I do about Philip?”

Madame cast her eyes up to the ceiling. “The child asks me what she should do! You will marry him, of course. You will have the wedding right here in this room, as soon as this law they have allow you.”

So that was the way it happened. She was married in madame’s living room, with madame sobbing all through the ceremony in huge abandon. Philip had been living in a state of shock since the night she had told him she’d marry him, and now his nerves were telling; he was almost ill. The welling tenderness rose in her and she knew that he was her whole world. Nothing else mattered. She was a woman grandly in love, and the wonder of it stripped her of logic.

More than a week passed before she wrote to Matt and Rosalie, but the letter, laced through as it was with guilt, seemed inadequate and she tore it up. She told herself that it was better to wait until she saw them. Besides, she still needed the money they sent. Philip made very little from the occasional sale of a picture, and he was as poor as she was. Oh, but someday it would all be different. In the meantime, her mail could still come to madame.

The weeks slipped by, the happiest she had ever known. Then gradually Philip began to talk of Taos, in New Mexico, where the air was clear and dry and the sunlight intense. It was a mecca for people like him, he said, and New York was a mess, all noise and polluted air. He wanted to live close to the earth, do his work and bake in the sun.

She laughed, playing with him as she supposed he was playing with her. “And what am I doing in this Utopia?”

“You can sing there as well as here.”

“Of course, darling. I could even give a weekly concert to the Indians and they could pay me with beads.”

He talked more and more of Taos, however, and at last she was forced to realize that he was serious. “But I have a career to follow, too; I have a destiny! Maybe my voice isn’t important to you, but it is to me and a few others who have invested in me. I can’t just chuck the whole business and go off with you to gratify a whim.”

But it was no use, and steadily but surely the precious thing they’d shared was leaving them. Sometimes she’d wake in the night and see him standing by the window, breathing heavily, and she’d know that he was wanting to be gone, if not with her, then without her. She had no choice but to go with him, and yet fighting to hold him, she hated him a little too.

He met her at the train when she came home from Vermont, and she thought he looked stricken, as though he had somehow been with her in spirit. Her words were almost unnecessary. “My mother sat there and laughed her head off. And Matt stared at me as if he hated me. And Rosalie — Rosy was stunned. She kept saying it was all right, she wanted me to be happy, but there she sat with her empty hands and her empty life, her faded face, and her shoulders stooping a little now from working for me. And then Matt told me how she’d walked four miles a day, sometimes through the snow when he couldn’t get the truck out, how she’d worked to send every cent to me as if it were a holy duty, and oh, heaven, Phil — ”

“I see,” he said gently. “So you’re not going.”

“No. I have a debt to pay.”

That was the end of their life together, because he left her and went alone, as she had known he would. For a time, she moved through a period of indifference to his leaving, since his act of selfishness numbed the love she had for him.

She went to madame and finally found the relief of tears on that capacious bosom.

“The peeg!” madame snarled. “Oh, if I could get these two hands upon him! But look — I tell you. Your heart is now broken; it is sometimes good for a woman who is an artiste to have a broken heart. Loving Philippe has done you no harm, even though he was a bad one.”

“Hasn’t done me any harm? Madame, I’m going to have a baby!”

The big woman’s reaction was one of horror, quickly followed by rich delight. “Then you will be complete at last! Then you will sing as you never sang before. Ah, Madonna, what a miracle this is! It is what I have prayed for!” Her eyes narrowed speculatively. “Does he know, that Philippe?”

“No. I didn’t want to keep him that way.”

“Aa-hahh. Then we still do not tell him. You are to remain with me, with the little Luigino and me, and we will go on with the lessons, and when the baby is born — ”

When the baby was born in December, it was a fine boy — the most beautiful baby in the world, according to madame. To Mona, the little face bore no resemblance to its father, but in its infant newness, the mark of its appearance in years to come, it was a miniature of the beloved lost brother.

She went home in February when the snow lay white on the mountains. The family was at early supper in the lamplight. She came in quietly, so as not to break the old silence in the house.

They looked at her as if she were an apparition. Matt jumped up and his chair fell over with a great crash, breaking the spell that bound them. He came over to her and lifted back the blanket that covered the baby’s face. They saw his own face whiten as he looked down upon the child’s, and they all heard him breathe, “Oh, my God!”

“I know,” Mona said gently. “That’s why I’ve named him Joel.”

She put her son into his arms, and suddenly the big man began to shake, hiding his face in the blanket, straining the child to him, and his sobs were all around them, filling the room. Rosalie, in her great compassion, went to him and touched his bent head, and then she, too, looked down into the baby’s face. She hadn’t known Joel, but she hadn’t needed to — this was a baby, a thing to be tended and served and loved. She took it from Matt with hungry arms.

In spite of the grief that was in her heart, and the new beauty, too, Mona said, “He’s yours, Rosalie. Yours and Matt’s. I’ve brought him to you, and I’ll never take him away, I promise you.”

Then Rosalie, with her face transfigured, did the beautiful thing that they were to remember all their lives. She took the baby and laid it in the old woman’s lap, passing the first words with her in more than twelve years. “Here, ma. Here’s your grandson. They say he looks like your boy, Joel.”

Mary Jordan was to know many exalted moments in her life, but there was never one to equal that. Anything was possible for her, remembering it. Alone now, she went back to Campagni, who told her that at last she was ready. Her voice was as perfect as one of her years could expect. But she must change her name. The sound, said madame, had to be right on the ears.

At first there were small engagements at clubs, then at hotels and the better night spots. People began to notice her for more than her voice. She dressed well and cultivated a reserve that was deadly in its effectiveness. Her beauty ripened; her figure was svelte, disciplined. In the third year, she had the lead in a Broadway musical, then went into radio. She made two pictures in Hollywood, both of them rather lavish and corny, to her way of thinking; then came back to radio as star on an oil company’s program that paid her a fantastic salary. Now Mary Jordan found her special medium in television. The combination of her face, figure, voice and personality had succeeded in crystallizing her dream; and the work, the sacrifice and the heartbreak had all been worth it. She was where she wanted to be. She was at the top.

Often she went home to see her family and young Joel, to be called Mona again, to find a deeper peace. The boy had made over the lives of the three lonely people, and he himself was happy. Happier and stronger than she could have made him, with a succession of nurses and boarding schools. If you could see them all — Matt following Joel with his eyes so proudly, teaching him to milk the cows and tap the maple trees, to hunt and to fish with him; Rosalie forever smiling now, stooping to drop a light kiss on the tanned young forehead; her mother softened, laughing over some nonsense of the boy who looked and acted so much like her own son — then you’d know she had done the right thing in giving up her child, no matter what the cost. It was a debt she’d had to pay.

I came to with a start, realizing that for some time I had been lost in a painting on the opposite wall; I had a sense of having been in it. It was a wonderful thing — a pueblo, with the twilight streaking the sand, and one giant cactus standing lonely and strong in the foreground.

I said, “So Philip Garfield was your husband. And that, I am sure, must be one of his best.”

“I bought it at the Ducheyne Galleries two years ago. I’m glad you like it. You see, it’s all I have of him.”

That was it. That was the part in her story that hadn’t satisfied me. “You never divorced him, so that must mean that you never wanted to marry anyone else. And I’ve heard, somewhere, that he doesn’t come East, even for his exhibitions. He never leaves the desert.” Had I really heard that or was I just imagining it? With all the talk that goes on, a person hears so many things that he stores away.

“I really don’t know. He hasn’t tried to contact me in all these years.” Mary Jordan’s beautiful mouth was suddenly vulnerable. “But even though he left me as he did, I couldn’t stop being his wife. I loved him, and I always shall.”

“But there’s no sunlight in the picture!” She turned her startled eyes upon me. “I — don’t understand.”

“You thought he left you to paint sunlight, but this is twilight and evening shadows. Look at the deepened purple on that butte in the distance. Where is the sun in this or a dozen others? I’m sure you’ve seen them.”

She was sitting up straighter now, following my thought. “I go to the Galleries. Please go on.”

“Mary — Mona, didn’t you ever wonder why a man like Philip Garfield would leave the woman he’d loved for four years and chase after a will-o’-the-wisp of sunlight in order to paint it? He could have painted anywhere — sunlight falls on city streets — city streets —

“New Mexico. You know what I think, Mona? I think Philip Garfield had to leave you. I think he was a sick man. You said he’d had pneumonia; you spoke about his heavy breathing — ”

“Oh, but that was emotional, when he was distressed or nervous — at least I thought that was it. He wasn’t ill — was he?”

“Probably. He said he wanted to go where the air was hot and dry, to bake in the sun; and to him, the atmosphere here was ‘polluted.’ Not to you and me, but to him. I think he had some respiratory weakness or an allergy to smoke and gases, and he knew it, and knew that it was getting him. Maybe some doctor had even told him that he wouldn’t live very long unless he went to the desert.”

“Oh, no!” She gave a little cry that had pain somewhere in it. “He knew I’d have gone with him if that had been it — anywhere — oh, anywhere on earth! I’d have given up everything!”

“Exactly. I’m beginning to like your Philip more and more. He understood you better than you think he did, Mona Kelsey — but he knew about Mary Jordan too. In ten years you’ve accomplished a lot, and it’s all turned out just as it was meant to. God had a pretty wonderful plan laid out for you, Mona. But now that you’ve taken care of your special debt to Him and to Rosalie, I think there’s one more He expects you to pay.”

“If I can,” she said. “If I still can — and I must find out.”

At the door, she took my hand and her lovely gray eyes were misted. “Whether you’re right or wrong,” she said, “God bless you. How — do you know so much?”

“I don’t. I only know smatterings, as I said. And people have to be in character. I think people are the most wonderful things there are.”

I left for the Coast the next day, so I didn’t see Mary Jordan again, and when 1 got back, it was too late. By that time, I was slapped by the backwash of all the rumors that had been spread about her dropping out of sight at the peak of her career. She’d had her contracts canceled because she was an alcoholic, a heroin addict, in trouble with the Government, her nerves had snapped and her voice had cracked. The last report was that she was in a mental institution up in Connecticut somewhere. I still think people are remarkable.

My heart leaped when I saw the card, because sometimes smatterings aren’t enough; there are occasions when you ought to know what you’re talking about. It was a colored picture of two little Navajos holding hands and squinting in the sun. On the back was a single message. “My life is just beginning — ”

It wasn’t signed. It didn’t have to be.

Featured image: Illustration by Coby Whitmore, © SEPS

Life is Fragile: Say “I Love You” a Lot

I remember my life in my 20s and 30s when I was single. I felt invincible. Life was so carefree. I lived in the present, didn’t think much about the future, and didn’t worry about anything (except perhaps finding a wife).

No longer. I’m well into middle age now (yikes!), married, and with two daughters. Life these days feels so precarious and capricious. Every day, good people die. Bad people live. Some children are lost to illness, random accidents, and willful acts of violence. Other children lose their parents for the same reasons. People die in their beds or thousands of miles from home. Old people die too suddenly or too slowly.

Life just feels so…fragile. Even when everything is going so well, we sometimes feel like we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Could it be a function of age and the awareness that, not only will we not live forever, but that our remaining years are fewer than those that have already passed? Maybe it’s that there is so much more at stake as we get older and have a family. Perhaps inevitability and inertia have replaced possibility and opportunity.

Our feelings of vulnerability likely stems from the realization that so much of our lives are out of our control. And that is a really uncomfortable feeling.

And it may not only be due to recognition of approaching mortality. Today’s media, particularly 24/7 cable news, has made worry, fear, anxiety, gloom, and doom profitable. When we read, watch, or listen to the news, we are bombarded by evidence of the adage, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ It’s difficult not to believe that we live in truly dangerous times. This, despite the fact that, thanks to all kinds of advancements and regulations, we have never lived in safer times. Yet, even the most logical of thinkers can struggle to resist the gravitational pull of perceived onslaught of injury, death, mayhem, disaster, and tragedy.

Like most parents, I feel a particularly sharp and persistent sense of vulnerability for my family. Anytime my girls are on their own, I have this nagging fear that they something bad will happen to them. When my wife and daughters are out for the day and are late returning home, awful images run through my mind. This feeling is especially acute when I leave for a work trip. The thought that I may never again see the three people I love most in the world always infiltrates my otherwise rational and generally worry-free mind.

I sometimes leave for trips early in the morning before my daughters are up, so I can’t say goodbye to them. On rare occasions, I leave after my wife and I have bickered. And then I have that thought that I might not see her again. I feel a pit in my stomach and an ache in my heart.

Because of this tenuousness of life, I don’t want to regret the last thing I say or do to my family. So, I’ve created a habit of sorts as my defense against that nagging sense of vulnerability and potential loss. Every night when I put my daughters to bed, I tell them I love them and give them a kiss. When my wife and I go to bed, I always kiss her and tell her I love her, even if I don’t necessarily feel that way at that moment. Every time we part, whether to run a few errands or on a week-long work trip, I make sure I say ‘I love you’ and kiss my wife and kids.

If my time is up, I want the last thing I say or do to show my family how I feel about them. And I want that to be their last memory of me that is etched in their hearts.

To end on a more life-affirming rather than morbid note, hopefully I’ll continue to return from my trips, my wife will come back from work, and my kids will arrive home from school for many years to come. Regardless, my ‘habit’ sure makes me feel better when that feeling of fragility sweeps over me. Perhaps you might try it too.

Here are a few tips to create your own practice for dealing with the uncertainty of life:

1. Identify the people you cherish the most
2. Find your own special way you want to express how much they mean to you (e.g., a hug, gesture, special words)
3. Look for places in your lives in which you want to convey your feelings toward your loved ones
4. Constantly remind yourself of your practice of love until it becomes habit

Featured image: Shutterstock

“The Woman Who Hated Children” by James Ronald

Published on June 23, 1951

 

He came home early because he was worried about his wife, but, on reaching the house, found himself reluctant to go in. All that awaited him was a dispirited greeting, an apathetic glance. He decided to work in the yard until supper. Ethel would see him from the window. If she wanted him she could call. But he knew she would not call. She would not want him. All she wanted was to be left alone.

When he climbed out of the car a cocker spaniel started to whine and strain at its leash. He stroked the silky ears and the young dog wriggled with ecstasy from nose to tail. Rags had spent a miserable day, tethered to his kennel by two yards of rope, with no human voice to comfort him, no human touch to gladden him; but in an instant his woes were forgotten in the joy of his master’s homecoming.

“Poor little chap,” said John Morgan. “Not much of a life, is it?”

He unsnapped the catch that fastened the squirming spaniel, and Rags loped wildly round and round, giving tongue to his delight at being free.

Morgan glanced about the yard, hoping some task would suggest itself. But he had pruned each shrub and bush within an inch of its life, and raked and swept the lawn, borders and path until he could not pretend there was any more to be done. The garage? No, he had spent several afternoons putting it in order. Well, there was always the car. He had washed it earlier in the week, but a rainfall next day had left streaks. If he went over them with a dry rag he ought to be able to spin the job out for a couple of hours.

Hanging coat and vest on a hook in the garage, he took down his overalls. As he slipped into them, his eyes fell on a bicycle standing close to a wall and he felt a dull ache within him. It was the right size for a well-grown boy of eight, but no boy had ever swung a carefree leg across it. Not a scratch on the gleaming chromium and bright red paint. The tires had the unworn factory tread. It stood there as shiny and new as when he first saw it in a shop.

He came out of the garage with an armful of soft dry cloths, and the spaniel ran to him, wagging his tail, wagging his whole young body, casting hopeful glances at the street and whining an appeal.

“Not now,” said John Morgan. “Later.” The spaniel’s eloquent stare said he failed to see why this was not the best possible time for a good long walk.

The man cast a glance almost of trepidation at the house. Comely, well-kept, inviting; designed for easeful living. He and his wife had put more than money and time into it, they had put something of themselves. Nothing forbidding about the fieldstone and clapboards, but he could not help feeling uneasy until he turned his eyes away.

He began to rub the hood of the car, his breath hissing through his teeth as he warmed to the work. In his fiftieth year, he had a well-muscled body and an air of self-reliance. Until lately, most people had warmed to him quickly because of his frank, good-natured expression. During the past months he had begun to wear a harassed frown and his shoulders were often slumped with discouragement.

District manager of a large industrial concern, he enjoyed his work and was good at it. When the time came to retire, he expected to enjoy his leisure. No financial cares. A lot of fishing, hunting and loafing to catch up on. Lately, his plans for the future had dwindled to nothingness. It was all he could do to get through each day without thinking of the next.

The spaniel scampered down the drive to look wistfully at the tree-lined street. He stood stock-still, watching a boy kicking a can along the sidewalk. A grubby little fellow in a ragged sweater and torn blue jeans. When he looked up, the dog wagged his stumpy tail ingratiatingly. The boy went down on his knees, holding out grimy hands and making encouraging sounds with his tongue and teeth.

“Hey,” he protested happily, as Rags romped over him, licking his nose and chin and ears. “Hey! Whatcha think ya doin’, huh?”

In a tangle, they rolled across the gravel. The spaniel tore loose and raced up the drive, yelping an invitation to follow. The boy pursued warily, keeping a watchful eye on the man bent over the car. Each step he took was tentative, his toes ready to turn the other way if need should arise. The spaniel raced to and fro between car and boy, with ears flopping, his whole being proclaiming that this encounter was a piece of wonderful luck and they must make the most of it.

Morgan looked up to find the child staring at him. A tow-headed urchin, skinnier than any boy should be. Sharp-eyed as a sparrow, and poised for flight. All one had to say was “Get!” and he’d be gone.

After one look, which the boy’s eyes met guardedly, Morgan grunted and returned his attention to the car.

He could hear the boy murmuring to the dog, talking to him without words, in broken sounds which Rags found entirely comprehensible. The boy was on his knees again and Rags was all over him. They sprawled in front of the car, alongside the car, behind it. They rolled over and over in the garage doorway.

“Holy gee,” said the boy, and Morgan raised his head.

The youngster was gaping at the bicycle, his puny frame tense with awe. He put out a trembling hand and almost, but not quite, touched the gleaming handle bars.

“Golly!” he stammered. “Some . . . bike!”

The man did not answer. The boy backed away a piece.

“I won’t touch it, mister. Honest.”

Beyond a tightening of the mouth, the man gave no sign that he had heard.

The boy licked his lips. “Swell pooch you’ve got, mister. What’s his name?”

“Rags,” said Morgan. His tone was harsh, but he atoned for it by adding, “What’s yours?”

“Ted, but the kids call me Runty. I’m going on ten, but I guess I’m pretty small.”

“It isn’t size that counts, it’s what you’re made of. Touch the bike if you like. I won’t mind.”

The boy drew a deep breath. His hands fondled the bright red frame as tenderly as if it were infinitely precious and fragile. The wonder of it brought him close to tears.

“Not a mark,” he said huskily. “I  —  I guess your kid takes awful good care of it.”

Morgan’s lips contracted again. “Rags seems to have taken a shine to you. What about taking him for a walk?”

“Gee, could I?”

“You’d be doing me a favor.”

“Maybe he won’t come.”

“He’ll go if I tell him it’s all right.” Morgan stopped and patted Rags. “Go with Ted, old boy. At-a-boy, good boy; go with Ted.”

“Here, boy,” said Ted, snapping his fingers. “Come on, boy. Let’s go for a walk.”

“Walk” was the spaniel’s favorite word, dearer even than “dinner.” He trotted after his new friend. Turned to look back inquiringly. Morgan waved him on and, his doubts resolved, he sprinted out to the street with a jubilant bark. Watching them go, Morgan thought that nothing in the world made better sense than a boy and a dog.

While they were gone, he put his back into his work. The monotony of it offered a sort of mental ease. When he straightened up and glanced at his watch more than an hour had passed since he drove home from the office.

The boy and the dog returned in gleeful spirits while he was washing his hands under the garage faucet. Ted told him an involved yarn about a squirrel that had been only a split second too quick, and Rags sat back with his tongue hanging out, blinking fondly from one to the other. Drying his hands, Morgan dug into his pocket for a quarter. Ted looked at the coin, but made no move to take it.

“It’s yours. You’ve earned it.”

“It was fun taking Rags out. I don’t want to be paid.”

“Take it. You did me a good turn.”

The boy’s eyes shifted to the bicycle. “I don’t want your money, mister . . . but I sure would like a ride on that bike.” Aware of the cloud that had come over the man’s face, he went on quickly, earnestly, humbly, “I wouldn’t go far. Only round the block. I’d take care, honest I would. Your kid won’t mind.”

About to refuse, Morgan realized the depth of yearning behind the appeal. And a bicycle is made to be ridden, not to stand in a sacrosanct place, a monument to frustration. It was not possible to deny the plea. It was too small a thing, and too big.

“Only round the block?”

“Cross my heart.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

“Gee, thanks.”

The boy almost choked with happiness. He wheeled out the bicycle, handling it with care. He swung a leg over the saddle; shot a radiant glance over his shoulder.

When he reached the house, the side door opened and Ethel appeared in frantic haste. Her mouth was open as if to scream, but no sound came out. She grasped the handle bars and shook them, throwing the boy off. He lay in a heap on the ground, staring up in consternation at her pale, contorted face. Stumbling to his feet, he ran shakily down the drive without looking back.

After a moment of shock, Morgan went forward limply and grasped the bicycle. At first it seemed his wife would not let it go. Her grip was so tight that her knuckles shone through the skin. He tried to speak to her, but was physically incapable of uttering a word.

“How could you?” she cried. “Oh, how could you? Timothy’s bicycle! My Timothy’s bicycle! How could you let another child touch it?”

Wheeling it back to its place, he sat on a packing case with his head on his hands. He sat motionless in the gathering dusk, and the spaniel shivered and whined at his feet. At last he led the little dog to his kennel and refastened the long leash. A reproachful whimpering followed him up the path to the house.

In the deserted kitchen, saucepans simmered on the stove. He paused for a drink of water before going through the dining room to the hall. The table was set for supper, but Ethel was not there. He knew where to find her. In the gaily papered room at the head of the stairs; that was where she would be. The room papered with sailboats and soaring gulls, with bright chintz at the windows and a gay spread on the half-size bed.

Climbing the stairs heavily, he stopped at the open door. Ethel was standing by the window, looking out, but he knew she was blind to the darkening street, the leafless maples, the rooftops above the hedges. What she saw, standing there, was in the recesses of her own mind. She was in control of herself now. Her rigid control was unnerving.

Many toys were arrayed on shelves around the room. The bed was neatly made, in readiness for an occupant. A Teddy bear lolled against the footboard. In the bathroom, a row of toy boats and buoyant playthings waited on the rim of the tub. All very tidy, much tidier than a small boy would have kept it. Waiting for small hands to disarrange, to grasp right and left and reduce it to a livable confusion. There was even a small suit of freshly laundered pajamas laid out on the speckless coverlet.

Morgan cleared his throat. “Ethel, let’s get rid of all this. Send it to an orphanage. Send it anywhere, but get it out of the house. There must thousands of children who  — ”

“Yes,” she said, “the world is full of children. Thousands of them. Millions. And I hate them all  — every last one  —  because they are alive and my little boy is dead.”

The nurse said crisply, “You may go in.” John Morgan put down an out-ofdate magazine and went through the door she indicated. The doctor, a forceful-looking man in the thirties, glanced up with a frown of recognition.

“Surely we’ve met.”

“When you talked to the Men’s Club. Your speech impressed me. It made sense. That’s why I’m here.”

“Take a seat. Offhand, I’d say you look pretty fit.”

“I’ve come about my wife.”

“Oh? Then, perhaps, she ought to be the one sitting in that chair.”

“She wouldn’t come. She won’t see a doctor. All she wants is to be left alone.”

“And you’re worried?”

“Worried as hell.”

The doctor filled his pipe. He slid his tobacco pouch across the desk.

Morgan said, “Thanks.”

“I can give you the best part of an hour,” said the doctor, leaning back and puffing contentedly. “Since coming to town I haven’t been overburdened with patients. Take your time. Just relax and tell me what’s bothering you.”

“I’ll be fifty next month,” said Morgan, charging his pipe methodically. “My wife is a year or so younger. We were in love when we married and somehow managed to keep our love — well, perhaps not exciting, but alive. We’ve always been in comfortable circumstances and our tastes are pretty much the same. The only snag was, we couldn’t seem to have a child.”

“A pretty big snag, if you want one badly enough.”

“Yes. It came to be an ache in both of us. We didn’t talk about it. In married life you mostly talk about the little things. On her fortieth birthday, Ethel turned to me and said, ‘Well, I guess it’s always going to be just the two of us.’ I kissed her . . . and put my heart into it.

“We had more sense than to sour our lives pining for what we couldn’t have. It was there, the emptiness, but we made the most of what we had. And then, after we’d given up hoping, our family doctor told Ethel she was pregnant. I don’t think either of us quite believed it, just at first. It was . . . too good to be true.”

Taking a creased snapshot from his wallet, he passed it across the desk. It was of a small boy in shorts and T shirt. Seven or eight years old, with sturdy legs and a winning smile.

“Timothy,” said Morgan, his tongue dwelling on the syllables.

“Fine little chap,” said the doctor.

His own wife was going to have their first child in less than a month. He certainly would not grumble if they got one like this.

“We were the most indulgent parents ever,” said Morgan, “but you couldn’t spoil a nature like his. He was all boy. Into everything. On the go. Never clean for five minutes at a stretch. When he was home you’d hear him all over the house. But he had another side. Sometimes he’d drop everything, run to his mother and throw his arms about her. In his own way, he sensed how much she needed his love.”

He chuckled. There was a faraway look in his eyes.

“I’ll never forget the day he learned that grownups have birthdays. He was four or five. I guess he thought grownups were ageless until he saw me giving his mother a diamond ring for her fortyfifth birthday. When we called him for supper, there was no answering shout. We hunted high and low. No Timothy. I was on the phone, calling the police, when he trotted into the yard. His face shone as if it were lit up inside . . . and in his hands he held a huge bunch of violets. They quite took the shine out of my three-carat diamond.

“Well, we knew he’d only had a nickel. And that was a mighty big bunch. Not the kind you find in the woods. The large-petaled, deep-colored sort the florists sell. Worth fifty cents, maybe a dollar. After Timothy was in bed, I took a run down to the neighborhood florist. He said, sure he sold violets to Master Timothy Morgan. A big bunch for a nickel. I offered to pay the balance, but the florist only laughed. He said, ‘One day, maybe fifteen years from now, Master Timothy will be coming in for orchids or gardenias, and then I’ll nick him but good.’

“After that, two or three times a year, Timothy bought flowers for his mother. Her birthday, Christmas. Any special occasion. Violets, if he could get them. A big bunch for a nickel, a dime whatever he had. Ethel kept them a long, long time and always saved one to press in a book.”

He was silent for a while, and the doctor sat in silence, waiting for him to go on, letting him take his time. Suddenly, Morgan started and seemed to come back from a far-off place. He blinked at the other man:

“You were telling me about Timothy,” said the doctor.

Morgan said, “There was a polio epidemic shortly before you came to town.”

“I heard about it.”

“A good many children were stricken. Some of them went quickly. Timothy lasted just twenty-four hours from the time he complained of a sore throat. He was trying to smile when they took him away in the ambulance, trying to tell us not to worry, he’d be all right. Ethel and I sat in a waiting room all night and all the next day, except for a few minutes at a time, when I coaxed her out for a breath of air. On one of those short outings we saw a bicycle in a window and went right in and bought it. For Timothy. To come home to. Maybe we thought he’d be sure to get well if we acted as though nothing else was possible.”

The palm of his hand started to hit the arm of the chair with a monotonous beat.

“She didn’t cry when they told us. Her insides seemed to collapse, but she didn’t cry. It’s nearly six months now, but she’s never shed a tear. Doctor, it isn’t good for a woman not to cry when she’s hurt.”

“And now?”

“Now we are strangers, leading empty lives in an empty house. No, it isn’t empty. It’s still full of Timothy. His toys. His clothes. His picture books. His puppy, shivering at the end of a leash. The pictures he cut out of maga- zines on rainy days. His clothes are laid out, waiting for him to jump out of bed and throw them on. We’re living in a museum, a memorial to a dead child. She sits in the room that is waiting for Timothy, and it cuts her to pieces, but she doesn’t cry.”

“I’d better remind you, I’m not a psychiatrist.”

“I know that. But I feel you understand people. For God’s sake, tell me what to do.”

“Sorrow is part of human experience,” said the younger man slowly, “but this isn’t sorrow, it’s despair. Out of sorrow we grow in stature and find resources we never knew we had, but despair can only destroy.”

“It’s destroying her. What am I to do?”

“Have you thought of adopting a child? That might be the answer.”

“She won’t hear of it.”

“Then move away. Your present home is a constant reminder. Take her away and make a new start.”

“My firm offered to transfer me to California. But as long as Ethel lives, she’ll never leave Timothy’s home.”

“From what you tell me, she’s beyond deciding for herself. The first thing for you to do is to get rid of the child’s belongings. Give them away, burn them, destroy them, but get rid of them.”

“How shall I do it? Shall I wrench his things out of her hands?”

“You’ve heard of Restmore, the sanitarium on the other side of town? Wait, I know what you’re going to say . . . but it isn’t the average mental home. They’ll make your wife comfortable, there’s no reason to shrink from the idea. The superintendent is a good chap; he’ll study her sympathetically. After a few weeks, restful weeks, he’ll have an idea what treatment to suggest. In the meantime, you can clean house. Get rid of every possible reminder of your child.”

The nurse put her head into the room. “Your office is on the phone, Mr. Morgan. Your wife has been trying to reach you. She wants you to come home right away.”

He drove faster than ever before. On reaching the house, he jammed on the brakes and jumped out, leaving the engine running. He took the front steps two at a time. “Ethel!” he called as he opened the door. His voice echoed through the empty house. Shouting again, he heard an answering call from the yard.

Ethel was standing by the kennel.

“John, he’s been stolen!” she said distractedly. “Rags has been stolen!”

Morgan stooped to examine the frayed rope. “Nonsense. He’s run away. He’ll come home when he’s hungry.”

“I don’t believe you. Someone has stolen hint.”

“Ethel, look for yourself. The rope has been chewed, not cut. You can see the marks of his teeth.”

“Why should he run away? He never has before. I know he’s been stolen. The boy who was here yesterday  — ”

Rising, he took his wife by the arm, doing his best to be patient. “Put on your coat and hat. We’ll take the car and look for him.”

Ethel said, “He’s tied up in some filthy outhouse”; but she went into the house for her things.

He felt his heart thumping. On the drive home he had been tormented by the dread of what he would find. He had imagined nothing so normal as a lonely pup running off to seek companionship. He knew that Rags himself meant nothing to Ethel. In their early married life she had never had a dog, never felt the need for one. She valued him only as a symbol. He had belonged to Timothy, and all Timothy’s belongings must stay in their place.

They drove slowly through the quiet neighborhood, peering right and left at every intersection, scrutinizing every hedge and driveway. They questioned a mailman, a delivery man, a boy bouncing a ball. No one had seen Rags. Several times Morgan got out and whistled, but no familiar bark answered.

“I knew we wouldn’t find him. I told you he was stolen. That boy  — ”

Morgan headed the car away from the middle-class suburb toward the meaner streets that fringed the sawmill. Row upon row of narrow frame dwellings standing so close that an arm reached out of one could touch the wall of the next. All sadly in need of paint.

A group of youngsters lounged at a corner. He put his head out and asked if they knew a boy named Ted.

“Ted?” said a freckle-faced boy with a jaunty cowlick. “Naw. No kid called Ted in this street.”

“They call him Runty.”

“Oh, sure,” said the lad, grinning widely, “sure, I know Runty. Two blocks down, brown house onna corner. His old man got hisself killed in the war. His ma takes in washin’. Can’t miss it, mister; you’ll see alla clothes onna line.”

Tossing the lad a quarter, Morgan drove on. He stopped at a house more rundown than the rest. The yard was crisscrossed by lines sagging under the weight of damp garments.

“You’d better wait,” he said, opening the car door.

“I’m coming with you,” said Ethel, reaching for the handle on her side. “If that boy stole Rags, I mean to give him a piece of my mind.”

“Wait,” he repeated flatly, and she sank back.

Morgan went up a chipped walk. His knock was answered by a woman drying her hands on her apron. Of decent stock, and determinedly respectable, but careworn and overworked.

She listened to him apprehensively and broke in before he finished speaking, “Yes, sir, the little dog showed up this morning. He had a bit of chewed rope tied to his collar. I told Ted to take him right back where he came from.”

A little girl in a shabby but spotless frock, with a ribbon in her straight blond hair, stuck her head through under her mother’s arm.

“He wasn’t at school, ma. He played hooky. I bet he went hiking in the woods with the puppy.”

“My Ted is crazy for a dog,” said the woman apologetically, “but he’ll bring it back. He’s a good boy.”

“I know he is,” said Morgan warmly. “Please don’t let it worry you.”

He went back to the car. Ethel was sitting stiffly erect, staring straight in front of her.

“It’s all right,” he said, climbing in. “Rags came looking for company and the boy took him for a walk. They’ll be back when they’re tired.”

He reached for the key, but hesitated before turning it. “Decent, hard-working woman,” he said. “Worth helping out. We could do a lot for people like that. I guess the kids need just about everything.”

Through tight lips, Ethel said, “Drive to the police station.”

He stared at her. “Why?”

“That boy stole Timothy’s dog. He’s got to be reported.”

“Ethel, that’s crazy talk.”

“I intend to report him. If you won’t come, let me out of this car.”

“We’re going home,” he said firmly. Ethel was silent all the way, and went into the house without looking at him.

It was not quite dark when they heard a timid rap on the back door. Morgan opened it to find Ted and Rags bunched timorously on the steps. They both looked thoroughly cowed. A strand of dry fern clung to one of the spaniel’s floppy ears.

“He  —  he wanted to go after rabbits,” stammered the skinny little boy. “He wanted to go after rabbits awful bad.”

“I guess he did,” said John Morgan. “Looks like he’s had quite a day. My wife was worried  —  she isn’t well  —  but I guess everything’s all right now.”

“You ain’t sore?”

“No, I’m not sore. When my wife gets over her fright, she’ll understand.”

The boy’s eyes flickered in sudden panic over the man’s shoulder. Morgan sensed the ominous presence of his wife directly behind him.

“You’re a little thief !” said Ethel fiercely. “If I had my way, you’d be locked up!”

The boy cringed; the little dog cowered. Morgan picked up Rags and tucked him under his arm.

“Go home, Ted. Run on home.”

He shut the door. Ethel turned her face away as he passed. In the morning he would call the doctor and make arrangements about the sanitarium. He could not see that there was anything else to be done.

He tried to read his paper, but was utterly unable to concentrate. He had loved his wife for twenty years. He would have said there could never be a problem too great for them to see through together. Now he felt baffled, beaten.

Ethel, too, was restless. She prowled from room to room, unable to settle.

At about eight the back-door bell rang. Morgan ros., immediately, but when he reached the ball Ethel was opening the door. Ted stood there humbly in his blue jeans and ragged sweater. The pinched little face wore an anxious appeal.

“I  — I’m awful sorry I worried you, lady,” he said. And he held up a large bunch of violets.

Morgan saw his wife’s back stiffening and held his breath in dismay. Violets. Was there any way to hurt her more?

“Who told you to bring those here?” she cried in a terrible voice.

The little boy started to weep. Between great gulping sobs, he gasped, “Please, lady, I  — I only had a dime!”

Ethel knelt and put her arms about the forlorn figure. She was crying, the tears were streaming down her cheeks, but they were not the sort of tears to frighten a child.

Morgan’s trembling limbs failed him and he leaned against a wall for support. He felt as if every drop of blood had been drained from his body and every nerve anesthetized.

But he knew — beyond all doubt he knew — that from now on everything was going to be all right.

 

Featured image: Illustrated by Thornton Utz.

Con Watch: The Terror of the Virtual Kidnapping Scam

Steve Weisman is a lawyer, college professor, author, and one of the country’s leading experts in cybersecurity, identity theft, and scams. See Steve’s other Con Watch articles.

In a scheme that ultimately resulted in her conviction and incarceration, Yanette Acosta would call parents, claiming that she had kidnapped their child and threatening them with violence if they reported the crime. The parents would often hear a distressed child’s voice in the background. She would then tell them to wire money or make cash drops in order to see their child alive again. In fact, Acosta was never anywhere near the child. The parents were victims of a kidnapping scam.

Phony kidnapping scams, also known as virtual kidnapping, have been going on for about twenty years. Their frequency has recently increased. In Laguna Beach, California, police are currently investigating two virtual kidnapping scams that occurred earlier this month. Police were able to thwart one of the scams before one family paid the ransom, but the other family was scammed out of $5,000.

According to FBI Assistant Director in Charge Paul Delacourt, “Virtual kidnapping schemes targeting American families are on the rise, and those perpetrating the crime have perfected their techniques. Victims of this terrifying scheme have experienced trauma, in addition to losing large sums of money.”

When the scam first began, the calls were largely in Spanish and targeted Spanish speaking people in California and Texas. However, around 2015, according to the FBI, they started expanding, and the calls started coming in English. The scam has expanded throughout the country with one FBI investigation identifying victims in California, Minnesota, Idaho, and Texas.

How It Works

The scam generally starts with a telephone call saying that a child or other relative has been kidnapped. If the family does not wire money right away, they threaten that relative will be killed. As with so many scams, we are often our own worst enemy, and this is no exception. In many instances, the criminals gather personal information about the intended victims from social media. The victim may indicate that they are traveling on vacation, making it easier to make the phony kidnapping appear legitimate. Armed with personal information, the “kidnapper” can provide personal information about the victim so it appears that they actually do have the person in their custody.

Sometimes the phony kidnappers manipulate Caller ID through a technique called “spoofing” to make it appear that the call is coming from a family member’s cell phone. However, the criminals may not bother to spoof the call. If the call does not originate with your family member’s phone, you can be pretty sure it is a scam.

Phony kidnappers will often request a ransom that seems low. (The average ransom demand in 2012 was $2 million.) Recently, WTHR in Indiana reported that Mark Walker received a phony kidnapping call demanding a $1,000 ransom for his kidnapped daughter. Walker, a private investigator, was immediately skeptical due to the low ransom amount. These small ransom demands are consistent with virtual kidnapping scams originating in Mexico, where there are legal restrictions on wiring larger amounts of money. While Walker continued to talk with the phony kidnapper, Walker’s wife called their daughter, who answered her cell phone and confirmed that she had not been kidnapped.

How to Protect Yourself

Although receiving a phone call about a kidnapping is very upsetting, try to be skeptical if you receive such a call.

If you do engage the caller, do not mention the name of your family member, and pay attention to see if they provide a name of the person they say they have kidnapped. Ask to speak to your family member.

Many of these kidnapping scams originate in Puerto Rico or Mexico, so be particularly skeptical if you receive a call originating from Puerto Rican area codes 787, 939 or 856. Also be wary of calls from Mexico which has many area codes. According to the FBI, many of the virtual kidnapping scams originating from Mexico are often being made by prisoners who have bribed guards to supply them with cell phones.

Never wire money to anyone for anything unless you are totally convinced that what you are doing is legitimate. Unlike paying for something with a credit card, once your wired funds have been sent, they are impossible to get back. Requests for money to be wired to an account in Mexico is a big indication that this is a scam.

Talk to the alleged kidnapper as long as possible, thereby giving someone else with you the time to call or text the alleged kidnap victim on their cellphone. If the purported kidnapping victim is a young child, call the school to confirm they are safe.

Ask the kidnapper to describe your relative, as well as provide information such as a birth date.It’s important to remember, however, that much of this kind of information may be available through social media or hacked accounts.

It also can be helpful for the family to have a code word to use to immediately recognize that this is a scam. If the kidnapper can’t provide the code word, it is clear that it is a scam.

If it were a real kidnapping, you would contact the FBI. However, for scam kidnappings, you should contact the Federal Trade Commission and the local police.

Featured image: Shutterstock

Escape from Vietnam: A Refugee‘s Story of the American Dream

I spoke my first words on a boat: “milk,” “cockroach,” and “itchy.” An unusual toddler vocabulary, perhaps, but not surprising considering that I spent the second year of my life on a freighter with thousands of other people, a floating petri dish of equal parts vomit, diarrhea, desperation, and hope. Every inch of that boat teemed with refugees: the cargo hold, hallways, and deck. Even the captain’s steering room had ceased to be a sanctuary.

I am an immigrant from Vietnam. I left the land of my birth in 1978 — just shy of my first birthday — and arrived in the U.S. a few weeks after I turned two. All of us on that boat, and hundreds of thousands of others, fled for the same reason: to escape the oppression of the communist regime. It took us more than one full year to arrive in the United States, most of that time spent on an over-packed freight ship smuggling 2,300 other refugees in a cargo hold full of festering flour and one functioning restroom.

Like many ethnic Chinese in Vietnam, my family members were merchants. My maternal grandma, who had fled to Vietnam from British-held Hong Kong as a teen to escape the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, had a fabric stall at Saigon’s Ben Thanh Market. My dad had a factory that manufactured shampoo and detergent. After the Vietnam War officially ended in April of 1975 with the fall of Southern Vietnam to the Northern Vietnamese communists, the new regime stripped our family of its livelihood, confiscating our family businesses and much of our savings. They also introduced a series of new currencies — each time capping the sum families were permitted to exchange. Anyone found with more was punished, the money confiscated.

Years later, my grandma would tell of counting her life savings, exchanging the maximum allowed, and burning the remainder. She described watching her tears fall into the flames as her money burned; just burning and crying, because what else was there to do?

Early in 1977, the year before we fled Vietnam, my mom was six months pregnant with me, and my father was in jail for “unpatriotic acts” after commissioning the building of a small junk boat he’d hoped to use for our escape. My mom visited my dad in his cell so he could help name me. He must have had money on his mind, as my name translated means gold and jade.

My grandfather had just passed away, but my maternal grandma still had five kids at home to raise. She was 4 feet 9 inches on a tall day and a breadwinning matriarch before her time. She negotiated an escape route for us on that Panamanian freight ship, but it would come at a steep cost.

There were 19 of us in total in my nuclear and extended family. Passage on the ship was purchased with luong, 1.2-ounce 24-karat gold bars. All told, 154 luong — more than $135,000 in today’s dollars — were required to smuggle my family out of Vietnam. Those bars were the culmination of a lifetime of work, coated with love and stamped with faith, molded into 24 karats of black market gold. Which is how we found ourselves part of the mass exodus that would come to be known as the “Vietnamese Boat People.”

After being denied entry at the ports of Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Brunei for temporary asylum, we floated aimlessly at sea, waiting. My mom watched over my 2-year-old brother and me while we all sat atop a 2-foot-by-2-foot table. Another family lived in a permanent crouch ­underneath. All around us, families staked their claims to plots of floor, sleeping upright, backs propping up backs. If someone needed to do their business or go in search of food, family members would stand vigil over the hard-won territory. Somehow, even as we were reduced to human freight, the framework of family held, in the form of “Go, I got your back.”

Eventually our freighter docked in the Philippines, but we were not allowed to disembark — all of the existing camps were full.

After a full 10 months at sea, we were finally transferred to a makeshift refugee camp on a Philippine island. My mom set me on the ground to roam and was pleased to discover that I could run.
At the camp, my parents and extended family underwent an arduous vetting process that included background checks and physical screenings with blood tests. Then came the search for a sponsoring country. A refugee who could claim a relative in another country was given priority there. Barring that, where you wound up was a crapshoot by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

My parents, my brother, and I lingered in this system for several months until a church group in Minnesota agreed to sponsor us. In one fell swoop, we were whisked from the humidity of the tropics to the subzero temperatures of a Midwestern December. The commitment and logistics of sponsoring and providing for a refugee family are significant, so the church group shared the responsibilities for clothing, sheltering, and integrating us into American life. One group of volunteers met us at the airport with donated secondhand winter jackets. Other volunteers helped us find and furnish a small two-bedroom home in the suburbs, while still others worked on getting sponsorship for the rest of our family, until all 19 of us were reunited.

Our family also relied on public social programs as we adjusted and assimilated into American society. My parents enrolled my brother and me in a Head Start preschool while they studied English, passed the GED, and took job-training classes. For a year or so, we lived on welfare and food stamps, supplemented by baffling 10-pound blocks of bright orange government cheese.

Within two years, my mom spoke English well enough to take a job in a bank, the start of a 30-year career that became our modest family livelihood. When it came time for my brother and me to think about college, we benefited from the expectation in our family that we would go. We had as role models close relatives who had recently graduated. But we also relied on programs like need-based grants, low-interest loans, and work-study programs.

We hear so much talk about individual resilience, self-reliance, and the proverbial bootstraps being the ingredients of the American Dream, and I’d like to think my family exhibited those traits in our extraordinary journey. But there is a lot more that goes into the American Dream’s promise of providing people an opportunity to improve their lives and to contribute to this great nation. Nothing exists in a vacuum, after all, and certainly not opportunity. We all rely on the springboard provided by our extended families, our communities (like those Minnesota church volunteers who made our American story possible), and, yes, government-­backed immigration policies and programs like those that let us enter, fed us, and then helped us obtain an education.

Now, more than three decades and a generation after we fled Vietnam, my younger child has just turned two — the age I was when I arrived in the U.S. Her first words? Milk, mama, and dada.

Kim Luu has M.Eng. and B.S. Environmental Engineering degrees from MIT and UCLA. She works in the environmental sustainability field in Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband and two kids. She wrote this for What It Means to Be American, a partnership of the Smithsonian and Zócalo Public Square.

This article is featured in the March/April 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives. 

Hospice Girl Friday | Coming Home to Say Goodbye

Devra Lee Fishman’s dear friend and college roommate, Leslie, died from breast cancer one month shy of her 46th birthday after a four-year battle with the disease. Being with Leslie and her family at the end of her life inspired Devra to help care for others who are terminally ill. Each week, she documents her experiences volunteering at her local hospice in her blog, Hospice Girl Friday.

Our volunteer supervisor sent out an urgent request on a Tuesday: ‘We have a rather unusual situation in the IPU tomorrow, and I’m looking for someone who can cover the 12-3 shift…we will receive a patient via air transport from Atlanta. He is from this area and his parents would like to have mechanical ventilation stopped closer to home.’

I could not recall a patient on a ventilator in the six years that I have been a volunteer so I did not know what to expect. I only knew that help was needed. I responded immediately:‘Yes, I am available.’

My supervisor sent more information: The patient was a 27-year-old man being treated for cancer. Chemotherapy paralyzed him and he was put on life-support. The family could not find a local hospital willing to admit him and eventually they were referred to our hospice.

On Friday mornings the inpatient unit is quiet with only a few staff taking care of patients and paperwork. When I arrived for my special Wednesday shift, there were additional nurses and higher-level administrators preparing for the arrival of the patient and his family. I saw small teams of people discussing and rehearsing the plan for the day, carefully reviewing checklists like pilots before a flight. The atmosphere was tense.

My supervisor was standing with the regularly scheduled volunteer at the front desk. I walked over, said hello and asked for an update.

“The plane is delayed,” she said. “We’re expecting the patient around 2 p.m. His father is traveling with him. His mother and siblings should be here any minute.”

“What is our role?” I asked, nodding my head toward the other volunteer.

“One of you will need to man the desk and help out with the rest of the patients,” she said. “The other might be called on to assist the family when they arrive. We’re not exactly sure what to expect.”

I was about to say ‘I’ll help with the family’ when I heard the other volunteer say it first. I was disappointed, as though I were now less important. I wanted to be a part of the experience, not a spectator, and then I remembered that the other patients needed support too.

Just as we finished our conversation, the front door opened and a woman and two teenage girls walked in. The woman was tall, slim, and looked like she was in her mid-40s. She walked up to the desk, smiled and said she was the patient’s mother. She then introduced her daughters and explained that two older sons were on their way from the college they attended together. She was calm and composed, as if she were checking in for a doctor’s appointment. I said hello as the other volunteer walked around the desk to greet them and offer a tour of the facility, which the mother accepted. Her daughters shuffled behind her.

A little after 2 p.m., the patient arrived. As he was wheeled in on a stretcher I was surprised to see that he was conscious and alert. I had to catch my breath as I registered that the decision to remove the ventilator might have been his.

I know the patients I see are terminal and have opted out of curative medicine and heroic measures. For them the dying process takes a natural course as the body shuts down, and hospice care keeps them comfortable during that time. While this young man was just as eligible for hospice care as anyone else, I was moved by his choice to remove his life support, and wondered how his parents—or any parents, for that matter—would cope with that decision.

Once I regained my composure I looked up and saw the patient’s father talking to the mother. He was older, heavier, and used a cane to walk. His sons must have slipped in quietly, because the patient’s four siblings were now sitting on the matching sofas, each pinned to a corner like they were trying to disappear into the cushions. The father broke away and went into the patient’s room. The mother sat down in a chair between the two sofas with her back to me.

“Okay so we’re here to say goodbye to Michael,” she said, scanning the sofas for a connection. No one looked up, but the younger girl started to cry. She hugged herself.

“I need you to be strong and remember we are a family. We will get through this together,” the mother continued as she looked from child to child. Still no eye contact. The crying turned into sobbing. The mother kept talking.

“No one wants Michael to suffer, right? This is his decision and we have to respect it. He is never going to get better, remember, he has cancer.” The sobbing continued as the girl covered her face with her hands. I walked over and placed a box of tissues next to her. The other three children sat as rigid as the furniture.

I hurried back to my desk to try to separate myself from their pain, but the girl’s sobbing was inescapable. I turned toward the nurses and other hospice staff and saw that we were all fighting back tears. None of us spoke while we listened to Michael’s mother try to console her children.

About 20 minutes later another volunteer came in to relieve me. I did not know when Michael’s procedure would begin, but I was grateful to be leaving before it did. (I learned that the ventilator was removed that evening; Michael passed away about 18 hours later.) I was surprised and disappointed that the situation and the family’s grief were too much for me to bear. I thought I was stronger and more able to step outside of my own emotions to help others deal with theirs.

I called my mother on my way home from the hospice. She’s always said that losing a child is every parent’s nightmare, and I wanted to tell her that even though I am not a parent, I finally understand what she means. She told me how precious life is and how lucky we are—my parents, brothers, and I are all alive and well (knock on wood). That day, just hearing my mom’s voice soothed me, as it always has. I hope Michael’s parents, brothers, and sisters find a way to comfort each other, too.

Previous post: Just Being There Next post: The Power of Listening

Treasuring Memories

More than the decorations on the annual Fraser fir tree or the wrapped gifts below it, Ann Balderston Glynn’s fondest Christmas memory is of her mother’s cream pies. She remembers how her mom would crush the graham crackers for the crust, pour hot butter to set it, and then stand over the stove stirring and stirring until the pudding consistency was just right.

“That pie represented home and love and family,” Ann says. As the years passed, she realized she wanted more than the handed-down recipe card from her mother. She wanted the stories that went along with it. So one December, 17 years ago, she returned to her childhood home in upstate New York, gathered her parents in the kitchen amid the ingredients for cream pie, and hit the record button on a video camera as her mother went to work. Ann’s mother spoke about learning the recipe from her mother on their farm in the 1930s while Ann’s father reminisced about a love of cooking that led to his career as a chef. (See also “Story Basics.”)

On that raw, unedited tape, Christmas pie became the centerpiece of a permanent family record.

Ann, 53, a married mother of two, is among a group especially eager to create—and celebrate—family history and turn it into a legacy, baby boomers. “That generation is at an age where they want to pass on family history to the next generation,” says John Paolo Canton of Ancestry.com, the world’s largest online family history resource. “It gives them a sense of being, a sense of belonging. They’re finding out family stories no one knew. It’s like a treasure hunt.”

According to a Harris Interactive poll conducted last year, four in five Americans have an interest in learning about their family history. And if there’s an ideal time to bring a family tree to life, it’s during the holidays, the traditional and sometimes only occasions, when multiple generations gather. Reminiscing about the good old days comes naturally.

Peppering the family matriarch or patriarch with questions at the Thanksgiving or Christmas table is a magical moment. That’s when it hits you that your relatives are flesh-and-blood time capsules. “You don’t realize how many questions you have until you don’t have the opportunity to ask them anymore,” says Michelle Ercanbrack, a family historian with Ancestry.com. The holidays are a call to action, a time to “open the door for those beautiful conversations. If that opportunity is lost, think of the cultural heritage your children and grandchildren are being denied.”

Think about it: These conversations fill holes in understanding who you are. Scott Tims of Dallas, Texas, describes the impact of stories told by family members around the holiday table. “My grandmother graduated high school in 1933, one of the very worst years of the Great Depression,” he says. She would describe trains running through town loaded with good, honest men, shabbily dressed, looking for work.

Those stories of hard times resonated when Scott found himself dealing with his own challenges in our current recession. “There were times I really felt sorry for myself and then I thought back to the stories my grandmother and father told me about their growing up and what they had and what they didn’t. It puts things into perspective.”

The New American Super-Family

Amanda Gentle and millions like her are proving Thomas Wolfe wrong. You can go home again.

Like so many other Americans, Gentle was hit hard as the financial dominoes fell in 2008. The value of her house dropped while property taxes soared. When she was laid off from her job as director of marketing and sales for a small publishing company, she could no longer keep up. The bank eventually foreclosed on her Indianapolis home.

So, at 35 years old, Gentle did what numerous other 20- and 30-somethings are doing: She moved back in with her parents.

“It was difficult,” Gentle readily admits. “I had a successful career, and I went from being on my own, in a good place, to basically starting over.”

Gentle is not alone. Adult children of boomers— famously overeducated and underemployed—have created a moving-back-home tsunami. The driving force behind this trend is financial pressure, particularly rising housing costs, health insurance premiums, and college debt. About 8.7 million young adults ages 25 to 34 became part of multigenerational households in 2009, an increase of 13 million over 2007. Now, more than one in five young adults lives in multigenerational households.

But it’s not just the young who are coming home to roost. Many elderly parents of boomers are moving in with their children as well. All told, the number of multi-gen households grew about 30 percent during the past decade, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And a Pew Research Center report found that 51 million Americans lived in homes of two or more adult generations in 2009, compared with 42 million in 2000. That’s a 21 percent increase in less than a decade, but more importantly it reflects a turning back to what used to be, well, normal.

“We had a 50-year experiment of thinking of families as two parents and two kids,” says John Graham, co-author of Together Again: A Creative Guide to Successful Multigenerational Living. “What’s happening right now is that the 50-year nuclear family experiment is ending.”

So you want to live under one roof? To successfully blend multiple generations into one household, here’s a checklist from Nancy K. Schlossberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and author of Revitalizing Retirement: Reshaping Your Identity, Relationships, and Purpose.

Click image to enlarge checklist.

 

Not everyone is moving back home. Some never left. Dan, a 25-year-old healthcare consultant, lives with his parents on the northeast side of Philadelphia. While going to college, he stayed at home, and after graduating, Dan gave independence some thought, then decided to stick around. The primary reason is the money he’ll be saving. “When I move out, I’d like to be able to make a down payment on a decent place, not some hole in the wall,” Dan says. “The best way to save money is to spend wisely and right now, that means living at home.”

Dan, who requested that we not use his last name, considers the decision to stay put a no-brainer. Apartments in his neighborhood cost upward of $1,100 a month, and with a $15-an-hour job, his budget would have been stretched to the absolute limit. “I didn’t want to move out on a whim,” he says.

Whatever the circumstances, being an adult in your parents’ home is different from being a teen there. Before Gentle moved in with her parents this past January, the family sat down in the living room and discussed expectations, including chores, financial responsibilities, and how long she would stay. This phase of basically resetting her GPS could have turned into an ugly high school flashback. Instead, having new structure in her life was soothing. “After all the stress of being laid off and losing my house, it was very comforting to be with my family,” Gentle says. “I’m used to being very self-sufficient and independent, but it was nice to take a deep breath for a moment and get back on my feet.”

Gentle has found a job and plans to move out again soon, but author Graham sees multi-gen living as the wave of the future. “The boomerang kids’ experience is spring training for the long season of baby boomer retirement,” he says. “They’re learning how to live together. That’s vital, because in the next 10 years, boomers will start moving in with their children.”

He’s undoubtedly correct, but the trend of elderly parents rejoining their children has already begun. When Hurricane Irene raked the Eastern Seaboard this past summer, 79-year-old Lois Bechtel grew uneasy as the winds increased and the rain pounded her Stamford, Connecticut, home. Instead of weathering the storm alone, the retired executive secretary describes how she dashed a few steps into the adjoining house to be with her daughter’s family, safe and secure. “If I lived on my own, I’d be by myself in storms or other emergencies,” Bechtel says. “Now I know that if I get sick, they’re close by. It’s a comfort.”

Bechtel lives in an attached, “in-law” apartment that allows her privacy when she wishes. According to a 2010 Coldwell Banker trend survey, home builders are on the multi-gen bandwagon, increasingly incorporating in-law apartments and adding other features for extended family members, such as separate entries, multiple kitchens, and second master bedrooms.