Big Money

Mary French

Poor Daddy never did get tucked away in bed right after supper the way he liked with his readinglight over his left shoulder and his glasses on and the paper in his hand and a fresh cigar in his mouth that the phone didn’t ring, or else it would be a knocking at the back door and Mother would send little Mary to open it and she’d find a miner standing there whitefaced with his eyelashes and eyebrows very black from the coaldust saying, “Doc French, pliz… heem coma queek,” and poor Daddy would get up out of bed yawning in his pyjamas and bathrobe and push his untidy grey hair off his forehead and tell Mary to go get his instrumentcase out of the office for him, and be off tying his necktie as he went, and half the time he’d be gone all night.

Mealtimes it was worse. They never seemed to get settled at the table for a meal, the three of them, without that awful phone ringing. Daddy would go and Mary and Mother would sit there finishing the meal alone, sitting there without saying anything, little Mary with her legs wrapped around the chairlegs staring at the picture of two dead wild ducks in the middle of the gingercolored wallpaper above Mother’s trim black head. Then Mother would put away the dishes and clatter around the house muttering to herself that if poor Daddy ever took half the trouble with his paying patients that he did with those miserable foreigners and miners he would be a rich man today and she wouldn’t be killing herself with housework. Mary hated to hear Mother talk against Daddy the way she did.

Poor Daddy and Mother didn’t get along. Mary barely remembered a time when she was very very small when it had been different and they’d lived in Denver in a sunny house with flowering bushes in the yard. That was before Brother was taken and Daddy lost that money in the investment. Whenever anybody said Denver it made her think of sunny. Now they lived in Trinidad where everything was black like coal, the scrawny hills tall, darkening the valley full of rows of sooty shanties, the minetipples, the miners most of them greasers and hunkies and the awful saloons and the choky smeltersmoke and the little black trains. In Denver it was sunny, and white people lived there, real clean American children like Brother who was taken and Mother said if poor Daddy cared for his own flesh and blood the way he cared for those miserable foreigners and miners Brother’s life might have been saved. Mother had made her go into the parlor, she was so scared, but Mother held her hand so tight it hurt terribly but nobody paid any attention, they all thought it was on account of Brother she was crying, and Mother made her look at him in the coffin under the glass.

After the funeral Mother was very sick and had a night and a day nurse and they wouldn’t let Mary see her and Mary had to play by herself all alone in the yard. When Mother got well she and poor Daddy didn’t get along and always slept in separate rooms and Mary slept in the little hallroom between them. Poor Daddy got grey and worried and never laughed round the house any more after that and then it was all about the investment and they moved to Trinidad and Mother wouldn’t let her play with the minechildren and when she came back from school she had nits in her hair.

Mary had to wear glasses and was good at her studies and was ready to go to highschool at twelve. When she wasn’t studying she read all the books in the house. “The child will ruin her eyes,” Mother would say to poor Daddy across the breakfast table when he would come down with his eyes puffy from lack of sleep and would have to hurry through his breakfast to be off in time to make his calls. The spring Mary finished the eighth grade and won the prizes in French and American history and English, Miss Parsons came around specially to call on Mrs. French to tell her what a good student little Mary French was and such a comfort to the teachers after all the miserable ignorant foreigners she had to put up with. “My dear,” Mother said, “don’t think I don’t know how it is.” Then suddenly she said, “Miss Parsons, don’t tell anybody but we’re going to move to Colorado Springs next fall.”

Miss Parsons sighed. “Well, Mrs. French, we’ll hate to lose you but it certainly is best for the child. There’s a better element in the schools there.” Miss Parsons lifted her teacup with her little finger crooked and let it down again with a dry click in the saucer.

Mary sat watching them from the little tapestry stool by the fireplace. “I hate to admit it,” Miss Parsons went on, “because I was born and bred here, but Trinidad’s no place to bring up a sweet clean little American girl.”

Granpa Wilkins had died that spring in Denver and Mother was beneficiary of his life insurance so she carried off things with a high hand. Poor Daddy hated to leave Trinidad and they hardly even spoke without making Mary go and read in the library while they quarreled over the dirty dishes in the kitchen. Mary would sit with an old red embossedleather Ivanhoe in her hand and listen to their bitter wrangling voices coming through the board partition. “You’ve ruined my life and now I’m not going to let you ruin the child’s,” Mother would yell in that mean voice that made Mary feel so awful and Mary would sit there crying over the book until she got started reading again and after a couple of pages had forgotten everything except the yeomen in Lincoln green and the knights on horseback and the castles. That summer instead of going camping in Yellowstone like Daddy had planned they moved to Colorado Springs.

At Colorado Springs they stayed first in a boardinghouse and then when the furniture came they moved to the green shingled bungalow where they were going to live that was set way back from the red gravel road in a scrawny lawn among tall poplartrees.

In the long grass Mary found the scaled remains of a croquetset. While Daddy and Mother were fussing about the furnishings that the men were moving in from a wagon, she ran around with a broken mallet slamming at the old cracked balls that hardly had any paint left on their red and green and yellow and blue bands. When Daddy came out of the house looking tired and grey with his hair untidy over his forehead she ran up to him waving the mallet and wanted him to play croquet. “No time for games now,” he said.

Mary burst out crying and he lifted her on his shoulder and carriedher round the back porch and showed her how by climbing on the roof of the little toolhouse behind the kitchen door you could see the mesa and beyond, behind a tattered fringe of racing cheesecloth clouds, the blue sawtooth ranges piling up to the towering smooth mass of mountains where Pikes Peak was. “We’ll go up there someday on the cogwheel railroad,” he said in his warm cozy voice close to her ear. The mountains looked so far away and the speed of the clouds made her feel dizzy. “Just you and me,” he said, “but you mustn’t ever cry… it’ll make the children tease you in school, Mary.”

In September she had to go to highschool. It was awful going to a new school where she didn’t have any friends. The girls seemed so welldressed and stuck up in the firstyear high. Going through the corridors hearing the other girls talk about parties and the Country Club and sets of tennis and summer hotels and automobiles and friends in finishingschools in the East, Mary, with her glasses and the band to straighten her teeth Mother had had the dentist put on, that made her lisp a little, and her freckles and her hair that wasn’t red or blond but just sandy, felt a miserable foreigner like the smelly bawling miners’ kids back in Trinidad.

She liked the boys better. A redheaded boy grinned at her sometimes. At least they let her alone. She did well in her classes and thought the teachers were lovely. In English they read Ramona and one day Mary, scared to death all alone, went to the cemetery to see the grave of Helen Hunt Jackson. It was beautifully sad that spring afternoon in Evergreen Cemetery. When she grew up, she decided, she was going to be like Helen Hunt Jackson.

They had a Swedish girl named Anna to do the housework and Mother and Daddy were hardly ever home when she came back from school. Daddy had an office downtown in a new officebuilding and Mother was always busy with churchwork or at the library reading up for papers she delivered at the women’s clubs. Half the time Mary had her supper all alone reading a book or doing her homework. Then she would go out in the kitchen and help Anna tidy up and try to keep her from going home and leaving her alone in the house. When she heard the front door opening she would run out breathless. Usually it was only Mother, but sometimes it was Daddy with his cigar and his tired look and his clothes smelling of tobacco and iodiform and carbolic and maybe she could get him to sit on her bed before she went to sleep to tell her stories about the old days and miners and prospectors and the war between the sheepherders and the ranchers.

At highschool Mary’s best friend was Ada Cohn whose father was a prominent Chicago lawyer who had had to come out for his health. Mother did everything she could to keep her from going to the Cohns’ and used to have mean arguments with Daddy about how it was only on account of his being so shiftless that her only daughter was reduced to going around with Jews and every Tom Dick and Harry, and why didn’t he join the Country Club and what was the use of her struggling to get a position for him among the better element by church activities and women’s clubs and communitychest work if he went on being just a poor man’s doctor and was seen loafing around with all the scum in poolrooms and worse places for all she knew instead of working up a handsome practice in a city where there were so many wealthy sick people; wasn’t it to get away from all that sort of thing they’d left Trinidad? “But, Hilda,” Daddy would say, “be reasonable. It’s on account of Mary’s being a friend of the Cohns’ that they’ve given me their practice. They are very nice kindly people.” Mother would stare straight at him and hissed through her teeth: “Oh, if you only had a tiny bit of ambition.”

Mary would run away from the table in tears and throw herself on her bed with a book and lie there listening to their voices raised and then Daddy’s heavy slow step and the slam of the door and the sound of him cranking the car to start off on his calls again. Often she lay there with her teeth clenched wishing if Mother would only die and leave her and Daddy living alone quietly together. A cold shudder would go through her at the thought of how awful it was to have thoughts like that, and she’d start reading, hardly able to see the printed page through her tears at first but gradually forgetting herself in the story in the book.

One thing that Mother and Daddy agreed about was that they wanted Mary to go to a really good eastern college. The year before she graduated from highschool Mary had passed all the College Board exams except solid geometry. She was crazy to go.

Except for a few days camping every summer with Daddy and one summer month she spent answering the phone and making out the cards of the patients and keeping his accounts and sending out his bills at his office, she hated it in Colorado Springs. Her only boyfriend was a young fellow with a clubfoot named Joe Denny, the son of a saloonkeeper in Colorado City. He was working his way through Colorado College. He was a bitter slowspoken towheaded boy with a sharp jaw, a wizard in math. He hated liquor and John D. Rockefeller more than anything in the world. She and Joe and Ada would go out on picnics Sunday to the Garden of the Gods or Austin Bluffs or one of the canyons and read poetry together. Their favorites were The Hound of Heaven and The City of Dreadful Night. Joe thrilled the girls one day standing on a flat rock above the little fire they were frying their bacon over and reciting The Man with the Hoe. At first they thought he’d written it himself.

When they got in, feeling sunburned and happy after a day in the open, Mary would so wish she could take her friends home the way Ada did. The Cohns were kind and jolly and always asked everybody to stay to dinner in spite of the fact that poor Mr. Cohn was a very sick man. But Mary didn’t dare take anybody home to her house for fear Mother would be rude to them, or that there’d be one of those yelling matches that started up all the time between Mother and Daddy. The summer before she went to Vassar Mother and Daddy weren’t speaking at all after a terrible argument when Daddy said one day at supper that he was going to vote for Eugene V. Debs in November.

At Vassar the girls she knew were better dressed than she was and had uppity finishingschool manners, but for the first time in her life she was popular. The instructors liked her because she was neat and serious and downright about everything and the girls said she was as homely as a mud fence but a darling.

It was all spoiled the second year when Ada came to Vassar. Ada was her oldest friend and Mary loved her dearly, so she was horrified to catch herself wishing Ada hadn’t come. Ada had gotten so lush and Jewish and noisy, and her clothes were too expensive and never just right. They roomed together and Ada bought most of Mary’s clothes and books for her because her allowance was so tiny. After Ada came Mary wasn’t popular the way she’d been, and the most successful girls shied off from her. Mary and Ada majored in sociology and said they were going to be socialworkers.

When Mary was a junior Mother went to Reno and got a divorce from Daddy, giving intemperance and mental cruelty as the cause. It had never occurred to Mary that poor Daddy drank. She cried and cried when she read about it in a newspaper clipping marked in red pencil some nameless wellwisher sent her from Colorado Springs. She burned the clipping in the fireplace so that Ada shouldn’t see it, and when Ada asked her why her eyes were so red said it was because it had made her cry to read about all those poor soldiers being killed in the war in Europe. It made her feel awful having told Ada a lie and she lay awake all night worrying about it.

The next summer the two of them got jobs doing settlementwork at Hull House in Chicago. Chicago was scary and poor Ada Cohn couldn’t keep on with the work and went up to Michigan to have a nervous breakdown; it was so awful the way poor people lived and the cracked red knuckles of the women who took in washing and the scabby heads of the little children and the clatter and the gritty wind on South Halstead Street and the stench of the stockyards; but it made Mary feel like years back in Trinidad when she was a little girl, the way she’d felt the summer she worked in Daddy’s office.

When she went back to Colorado Springs for two weeks before Vassar opened she found Mother staying in style in a small suite at the Broadmoor. Mother had inherited a block of stocks in American Smelting and Refining when Uncle Henry was killed in a streetcar accident in Denver, and had an income of twenty thousand a year. She had become a great bridgeplayer and was going round the country speaking at women’s clubs against votes for women. She spoke of Daddy in a sweet cold acid voice as “your poor dear father,” and told Mary she must dress better and stop wearing those awful spectacles. Mary wouldn’t take any money from her mother because she said nobody had a right to money they hadn’t earned, but she did let her fit her out with a new tailored tweed suit and a plain afternoondress with a lace collar and cuffs. She got along better with her mother now, but there was always a cold feeling of strain between them.

Mother said she didn’t know where Daddy was living, so Mary had to go down to the office to see him. The office was dingier than she remembered it, and full of patients, downandoutlooking people mostly, and it was an hour before he could get away to take her to lunch.

They ate perched on stools at the counter of the little lunchroom next door. Daddy’s hair was almost white now and his face was terribly lined and there were big grey pouches under his eyes. Mary got a lump in her throat every time she looked at him. “Oh, Daddy, you ought to take a rest.” “I know… I ought to get out of the altitude for a while. The old pump isn’t so good as it was.” “Daddy, why don’t you come east at Christmas?” “Maybe I will if I can raise the kale and get somebody to take over my practice for a month.” She loved the deep bass of his voice so. “It would do you so much good… It’s so long since we had a trip together.”

It was late. There was nobody in the lunchroom except the frozenmouthed waitress who was eating her own lunch at a table in the back. The big tiredfaced clock over the coffeeurn was ticking loud in the pauses of Daddy’s slow talk.

“I never expected to neglect my own little girl… you know how it is… that’s what I’ve done… How’s your mother?” “Oh, Mother’s on top of the world,” she said with a laugh that sounded tinny in her ears. She was working to put Daddy at his ease, like a charity case. “Oh, well, that’s all over now… I was never the proper husband for her,” said Daddy.

Mary felt her eyes fill with tears. “Daddy, after I’ve graduated will you let me take over your office? That awful Miss Hylan is so slipshod…” “Oh, you’ll have better things to do. It’s always a surprise to me how many people pay their bills anyway… I don’t pay mine.” “Daddy, I’m going to have to take you in hand.” “I reckon you will, daughter… your settlement work is just trainin’ for the reform of the old man, eh?” She felt herself blushing.

She’d hardly settled down to being with him when he had to rush off to see a woman who had been in labor five days and hadn’t had her baby yet. She hated going back to the Broadmoor and the bellhops in monkeyjackets and the overdressed old hens sitting in the lobby. That evening Joe Denny called up to see if he could take her out for a drive. Mother was busy at bridge so she slipped out without saying anything to her and met him on the hotel porch. She had on her new dress and had taken off her glasses and put them in her little bag. Joe was all a blur to her but she could make out that he looked well and prosperous and was driving a new little Ford roadster.

“Why, Mary French,” he said, “why, if you haven’t gone and got goodlooking on me… I guess there’s no chance now for a guy like me.”

They drove slowly round the park for a while and then he parked the car in a spot of moonlight over a culvert. Down the little gully beyond the quakingaspens you could see the plains dark and shimmery stretching way off to the moonlit horizon. “How lovely,” she said. He turned his serious face with its pointed chin to hers and said stammering a little, “Mary, I’ve got to spit it out… I want you and me to be engaged… I’m going to Cornell to take an engineering course… scholarship… When I get out I ought to be able to make fair money inside of a couple of years and be able to support a wife… It would make me awful happy… if you’d say maybe… if by that time… there wasn’t anybody else…” His voice dwindled away.

Mary had a glimpse of the sharp serious lines of his face in the moonlight. She couldn’t look at him.

“Joe, I always felt we were friends like Ada and me. It spoils everything to talk like that… When I get out of college I want to do socialservice work and I’ve got to take care of Daddy… Please don’t… anything like that makes me feel awful.”

He held his square hand out and they shook hands solemnly over the dashboard. “All right, sister, what you say goes,” he said and drove her back to the hotel without another word. She sat a long time on the porch looking out at the September moonlight feeling awful.

A few days later when she left to go back to school it was Joe who drove her to the station to take the train east because Mother had an important committeemeeting and Daddy had to be at the hospital. When they said goodby and shook hands he tapped her nervously on the shoulder a couple of times and acted like his throat was dry, but he didn’t say anything more about getting engaged. Mary was so relieved.

On the train she read Ernest Poole’s The Harbor and reread The Jungle and lay in the pullmanberth that night too excited to sleep, listening to the rumble of the wheels over the rails, the clatter of crossings, the faraway spooky wails of the locomotive, remembering the overdressed women putting on airs in the ladies’ dressingroom who’d elbowed her away from the mirror and the heavyfaced businessmen snoring in their berths, thinking of the work there was to be done to make the country what it ought to be, the social conditions, the slums, the shanties with filthy tottering backhouses, the miners’ children in grimy coats too big for them, the overworked women stooping over stoves, the youngsters struggling for an education in nightschools, hunger and unemployment and drink, and the police and the lawyers and the judges always ready to take it out on the weak; if the people in the pullmancars could only be made to understand how it was; if she sacrificed her life, like Daddy taking care of his patients night and day, maybe she, like Miss Addams…

She couldn’t wait to begin. She couldn’t stay in her berth. She got up and went and sat tingling in the empty dressingroom trying to read The Promise of American Life. She read a few pages but she couldn’t take in the meaning of the words; thoughts were racing across her mind like the tatters of cloud pouring through the pass and across the dark bulk of the mountains at home. She got cold and shivery and went back to her berth.

Crossing Chicago she suddenly told the taximan to drive her to Hull House. She had to tell Miss Addams how she felt. But when the taxi drew up to the curb in the midst of the familiar squalor of South Halstead Street and she saw two girls she knew standing under the stone porch talking, she suddenly lost her nerve and told the driver to go on to the station.

Back at Vassar that winter everything seemed awful. Ada had taken up music and was studying the violin and could think of nothing but getting down to New York for concerts. She said she was in love with Dr. Muck of the Boston Symphony and wouldn’t talk about the war or pacifism or social work or anything like that. The world outside — the submarine campaign, the war, the election — was so vivid Mary couldn’t keep her mind on her courses or on Ada’s gabble about musical celebrities. She went to all the lectures about current events and social conditions.

The lecture that excited her most that winter was G. H. Barrow’s lecture on “The Promise of Peace.” He was a tall thin man with bushy grey hair and a red face and a prominent adamsapple and luminous eyes that tended to start out of his head a little. He had a little stutter and a warm confidential manner when he talked. He seemed so nice somehow Mary felt sure he had been a workingman. He had red gnarled hands with long fingers and walked up and down the room with a sinewy stride taking off and putting on a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. After the lecture he was at Mr. Hardwick’s house and Mrs. Hardwick served lemonade and cocoa and sandwiches and the girls all gathered round and asked questions. He was shyer than on the platform but he talked beautifully about Labor’s faith in Mr. Wilson and how Labor would demand peace and how the Mexican revolution (he’d just been to Mexico and had had all sorts of adventures there) was just a beginning. Labor was going to get on its feet all over the world and start cleaning up the mess the old order had made, not by violence but by peaceful methods, Wilsonian methods. That night when Mary got to bed she could still feel the taut appealing nervous tremble that came into Mr. Barrow’s voice sometimes. It made her crazy anxious to get out of this choky collegelife and out into the world. She’d never known time to drag so as it did that winter.

One slushy day of February thaw she’d gone back to the room to change her wet overshoes between classes when she found a yellow telegram under the door: BETTER COME HOME FOR A WHILE YOUR MOTHER NOT VERY WELL. It was signed DADDY. She was terribly worried but it was a relief to have an excuse to get away from college. She took a lot of books with her but she couldn’t read on the train. She sat there too hot in the greenplush pullman with a book on her knees, staring out at the flat snowcovered fields edged with tangles of bare violet trees and the billboards and the shanties and redbrick falsefront stores along new concrete highways and towns of ramshackle frame houses sooty with factorysmoke and the shanties and the barns and the outhouses slowly turning as the train bored through the midwest, and thought of nothing.

Daddy met her at the station. His clothes looked even more rumpled than usual and he had a button off his overcoat. His face was full of new small fine wrinkles when he smiled. His eyes were redrimmed as if he hadn’t slept for nights.

“It’s all right, Mary,” he said. “I oughtn’t to have wired you to come… just selfindulgence… gettin’ lonely in my old age.” He grabbed her bag from the porter and went on talking as they walked out of the station. “Your mother’s goin’ along fine… I pulled her through… Lucky I got wind that she was sick. That damn housephysician at the hotel would have killed her in another day. This Spanish influenza is tricky stuff.”

“Is it bad here, Daddy?”

“Very… I want you to be very careful to avoid infection… Hop in, I’ll drive you out there.” He cranked the rusty touringcar and motioned her into the front seat. “You know how your poor mother feels about liquor?… Well, I kept her drunk for four days.”

He got in beside her and started, talking as he drove. The iron cold made her feel better after the dusty choking plush-smell of the sleeper. “She was nicer than I’ve ever known her. By God, I almost fell in love with her all over again… You must be very careful not to let her do too much when she gets up… you know how she is… It’s the relapses that kill in this business.”

Mary felt suddenly happy. The bare twigs of the trees rosy and yellow and purple spread against the blue over the broad quiet streets. There were patches of frozen snow on the lawns. The sky was tremendously tall and full of yellow sunlight. The cold made the little hairs in her nose crisp.

Out at the Broadmoor Mother was lying in her bed in her neat sunny room with a pink bedjacket on over her nightgown and a lace boudoircap on her neatlycombed black hair. She looked pale but so young and pretty and sort of foolish that for a second Mary felt that she and Daddy were the grownup people and Mother was their daughter. Right away Mother started talking happily about the war and the Huns and the submarine campaign and what could Mr. Wilson be thinking of not teaching those Mexicans a lesson. She was sure it wouldn’t have been like that if Mr. Hughes had been elected; in fact she was sure that he had been elected legally and that the Democrats had stolen the election by some skulduggery or other. And that dreadful Bryan was making the country a laughingstock. “My dear, Bryan is a traitor and ought to be shot.” Daddy grinned at Mary, shrugged his shoulders and went off saying, “Now, Hilda, just stay in bed, and please, no alcoholic excess.”

When Daddy had gone Mother suddenly started to cry. When Mary asked her what was the matter she wouldn’t say. “I guess it’s the influenza makes me weak in the head,” she said. “My dear, it’s only by the mercy of God that I was spared.”

Mary couldn’t sit all day listening to her mother go on about preparedness, it made her feel too miserable; so she went down to Daddy’s office next morning to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. The waitingroom was crowded. When she peeped into his consultingroom she could see at a glance that he hadn’t been to bed all night. It turned out that Miss Hylan had gone home sick the day before. Mary said she’d take her place but Daddy didn’t want to let her. “Nonsense,” said Mary, “I can say doctor’s office over the phone as well as that awful Miss Hylan can.” He finally gave her a gauze mask and let her stay.

When they’d finished up the last patient they went over to the lunchroom for something to eat. It was three o’clock. “You’d better go out and see your mother,” he said. “I’ve got to start on my rounds. They die awful easy from this thing. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“I’ll go back and tidy up the desk first,” said Mary firmly.

“If anybody calls up tell them that if they think it’s the flu, the patient must be put right to bed, keep their feet warm with a hotwater bottle and plenty of stimulants. No use trying to go to the hospital because there’s not a bed in a radius of a hundred miles.”

Mary went back to the office and sat down at the desk. There seemed to be an awful lot of new patients; on the last day Miss Hylan had run out of indexcards and had written their names on a scratchpad. They were all flu cases. While she sat there the phone rang constantly. Mary’s fingers were cold and she felt trembly all over when she heard the anxious voices, men’s, women’s, asking for Doc French. It was five before she got away from the office. She took the streetcar out to the Broadmoor.

It gave her quite a turn to hear the band playing in the casino for the teadance and to see the colored lights and feel the quiet warmth of the hotel halls and the air of neat luxury in her mother’s room. Mother was pretty peevish and said what was the use of her daughter’s coming home if she neglected her like this. “I had to do some things for Daddy,” was all Mary said. Mother started talking a blue streak about her campaign to put German women out of the Woman’s Tuesday Lunch Club. It went on all through supper. After supper they played cribbage until Mother began to feel sleepy.

The next day Mother said she felt fine and would sit up in a chair. Mary tried to get Daddy on the phone to see if she ought to but there was no answer from the office. Then she remembered that she’d said she’d be there at nine and rushed downtown. It was eleven o’clock and the waitingroom was full before Daddy came in. He’d evidently just been to a barbershop to get shaved but he looked deadtired. “Oh, Daddy, I bet you haven’t been to bed.” “Sure, I got a couple of hours in one of the interne’s rooms at the hospital. We lost a couple of cases last night.”

All that week Mary sat at the desk in the waitingroom of Daddy’s office, answering the phone through the gauze mask, telling frightened flushed men and women who sat there feeling the aches beginning in their backs, feeling the rising fever flush their cheeks, not to worry, that Doc French would be right back. At five she’d knock off and go to the hotel to eat supper and listen to her mother talk, but Daddy’s work would be just beginning. She tried hard to get him to take a night off for sleep every other night. “But how can I? McGuthrie’s laid up and I’ve got all his practice to handle as well as my own… This damn epidemic can’t last indefinitely… When it lets up a little we’ll go out to the Coast for a couple of weeks. How about it?” He had a hacking cough and looked grey under the eyes but he insisted he was tough and felt fine.

Sunday morning she got downtown late because she’d had to go to church with Mother and found Daddy dozing hunched up in a chair. When she came into the office he jumped up with a guilty look and she noticed that his face was very flushed. “Been to church, eh, you and your mother?” he said in a curious rasping voice. “Well, I’ve got to be gettin’ about my business.” As he went out the door with his soft felt hat pushed far down over his eyes it crossed Mary’s mind that perhaps he’d been drinking.

There didn’t seem to be many calls that Sunday so she went back home in time to take a drive with her mother in the afternoon. Mrs. French was feeling fine and talking about how Mary ought to make her debut next fall. “After all, you owe it to your parents to keep up their position, dear.” Talk like that made Mary feel sick in the pit of her stomach. When they got back to the hotel she said she felt tired and went to her room and lay on the bed and read The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Before she went out next morning she wrote a letter to Miss Addams telling her about the flu epidemic and saying that she just couldn’t go back to college, with so much misery going on in the world, and couldn’t they get her something to do at Hull House? She had to feel she was doing something real. Going downtown in the streetcar she felt rested and happy at having made up her mind; at the ends of streets she could see the range of mountains white as lumps of sugar in the brilliant winter sunshine. She wished she was going out for a hike with Joe Denny. When she put her key in the office door the carbolic iodiform alcohol reek of the doctor’s office caught her throat. Daddy’s hat and coat were hanging on the rack. Funny, she hadn’t noticed his car at the curb. The groundglass door to the consultingroom was closed. She tapped on it. “Daddy,” she called. There was no answer. She pushed the door open. Oh, he was asleep. He was lying on the couch with the laprobe from the car over his knees. The thought crossed her mind, how awful if he was dead-drunk. She tiptoed across the room. His head was jammed back between the pillow and the wall. His mouth had fallen open. His face, rough with the grey stubble, was twisted and strangled, eyes open. He was dead.

Mary found herself going quietly to the telephone and calling up the emergency hospital to say Dr. French had collapsed. She was still sitting at the telephone when she heard the ambulance bell outside. An interne in a white coat came in. She must have fainted because she next remembered being taken in a big car out to the Broadmoor. She went right to her room and locked herself in. She lay down on her bed and began to cry. Some time in the night she called up her mother’s room on the phone. “Please, Mother, I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to go to the funeral. I want to go right back to college.”

Mother made an awful rumpus but Mary didn’t listen to what she said and at last next morning Mother gave her a hundred dollars and let her go. She didn’t remember whether she’d kissed her mother when she left or not. She went down to the depot alone and sat two hours in the waitingroom because the train east was late. She didn’t feel anything. She seemed to be seeing things unusually vividly, the brilliant winter day, the etched faces of people sitting in the waitingroom, the colors on the magazines on the newsstand. The porter came to get her for the train. She sat in the pullman looking out at the snow, the yellow grass, the red badlands, the wire fences, the stockcorrals along the track standing up grey and yellowish out of the snow, the watertanks, the little stations, the grainelevators, the redfaced trainmen with their earflaps and gauntlets. Early in the morning going through the industrial district before Chicago she looked out at the men, young men old men with tin dinnerpails, faces ruddy and screwed up with the early cold, crowding the platforms waiting to go to work. She looked in their faces carefully, studying their faces; they were people she expected to get to know, because she was going to stay in Chicago instead of going back to college.