Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 59
AFTER her peaceful day Alice faced the fact that trouble started oftener with Tom than with her. These thoughts she told to no one, neither did she consider them disloyal. She wondered about them.
She wondered about it the more because Tom on his part had two very different views about her.
In one, Alice saw herself as a feckless, supine thing, incapable of order, who, with open eyes, pusillanimously permitted herself to be bamboozled by her entire household for the sake of a shameful peace. This idea Tom often voiced loudly.
His other idea about her he let out without meaning to. Alice, it seemed, was the one who stirred up discord. If Alice went away, the household ran with exemplary smoothness. With Tom in command, the children at once became responsible and obedient. Laurie forgot her habits of disorder; once under the hands of a master she became systematic, patient and given to scrubbing the bottoms of pots and pans without being told. But let Alice come back again and it was all up, because Alice spoiled them all and stirred things up so.
"When we are more civilized," Alice told Tom's mother, "a woman and her children will form the home, the center of things, and the husband will live outside, and come and visit and behave himself, and then things will be less complicated."
To this Mrs. Marcey, instead of being shocked at Alice's flights of imagination, replied:
"I have always said that something will have to be done about Men; and yet we all know, while they upset every household in which they set a foot, we can't get on without them!"
Yet there were times enough when Alice wished one could. For the more Tom mixed himself up in the government of the family the worse things got. Though, of course, it was a challenge to Tom to mix himself when Robert pushed back his plate at the dinner table and proclaimed:
"I hate boiled beef!"
It marked a crisis in the life of the Marceys. Tom arose from his chair and slammed his napkin upon it and burst out:
"There is one thing I will not stand—there is one torture I will not endure"—his language was Biblical—"and that is these children commenting upon the food set before them. I am so familiar with the fact that Sara hates tapioca that the sight of it makes me shudder, much as I like it myself. I have got to the point, Alice, where your struggles with Jamie over soup are a thing that gets on my nerves. And when for a week on end—a week on end mark you—I hear Robert saying, 'I won't eat this,' I have reached the limit! There is nothing wrong with the food. Therefore, there must be something wrong with the children!" Alice expected him to leave the room at this point, but he paused at the door to say, "Sometimes they eat everything in sight, and you can't stop 'em eating; they gulp their food like young cormorants, which is just as bad, I think, and I am tired of it."
He had placed the responsibility of everything on Alice's shoulders. From his tone one might have gathered that he had no part or parcel in these children, anyway; that they were her children, and that by some sleight of hand, he had got rid of his parenthood—and as for responsibility for this State of Things! Well, that was the fault of Alice and the food. And what Tom Marcey wanted was the State of Things altered, and that right away.
"If you think it is a pleasant thing," he went on, "to see Sara eat one grain of rice like Amina with an expression of endurance upon her face, if you think it pleases me to see Robert, at his age—at his age—gnawing chops like a prehistoric cave man"
Here Alice showed spirit. She said, "Well, then, why don't you change it? Why don't you make them eat the way they ought to eat?"
"By Jove!" he exclaimed, "I will! You bet I will! What do we talk about at table?" he demanded, coming back to his first manner, "but what the children are eating or not eating? Have we any other topic of conversation? Do we ever, when we are alone, speak of anything else except what they do or do not eat, and how bad their table manners are? I don't believe that there's another household like this in the whole United States."
So saying, he went away hastily.
Silence brooded over the desolated Marcey dinner table, a silence that Sara finally broke.
"I know why Papa's so mad," she chirped; "I know what Papa wouldn't stand, Robert Marcey. It's because you eat chop bones, yes, and chicken bones, too, when he isn't looking, with your fingers."
To this Robert replied with gloom.
"Yes, and what do you eat yours with—your toes?"
This struck Sara funny. Amid gurglings and chirpings, she said:
"Mother, could one eat bones with one's toes, if one tried?"
Robert made a shrug toward his mother, a shrug which said, "You see, I told you, she's defective. Her mind isn't what it ought to be."
During this scene Jamie had not been idle. He had ignored his plate of wholesome food, and he had had time to make an entire meal of nuts and raisins, set, apparently, out of his reach. By what prestidigitation he had come by them, Alice could not find out. The point was that he irrevocably had them. He now contributed, with a smile of angelic sweetness:
"I love raisins and nuts!"
Rage broke out in Robert's heart. "Look at him! Look at him!" he cried. "He's eaten every one of them! He's eaten every one! And you said if we ate our food properly, an' all of it—and all of it—we could have seven nuts and seven raisins apiece!"
Sara screamed: "Look at him, Mother! He didn't eat anything before Father left, an' he didn't eat a thing after Father left, and now he's eaten every single nut and every single raisin except some eenty-weenty ones. He's a bad boy!"
To which Jamie replied, simply, "I'm finished."
He slipped down from his chair and left the table.
Here they all acted as though the meal were finished, but Alice was made of sterner stuff.
"No child shall leave this table," she proclaimed, "until he has eaten all the meat and the macaroni upon his plate."
Sara the practical inquired, "And do we get our nuts and raisins just the same?"
"Where from, you idiot?" gloomed Robert.
"Where the others came from," Sara returned, as one who spoke of a land flowing with nuts and raisins.
For once her mother agreed with her. "Certainly, where the others came from," she said. "You shall have them."
They ate silently and slowly, but on Robert's part with gloom. Sara, whose more volatile spirits were upheld by the thought of the nuts and raisins, ate with greater cheer. Alice sat back in her chair, discouraged. It had not been a pleasant meal—except for Jamie. Tom, too, had had some fun.