My American Wife: A Saga of to-Day

I

BEFORE our college days Margaret brought me up along with the children. I have before me a picture of our oldest, among twenty-one other American boys and girls — strains of fifteen nations and a dozen creeds and races in a Manhattan schoolroom. Indian, Negro, and Turkish offspring happen to be in the group; likewise remnants of four ancient cultures: Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Moslem. For years these twenty-two American children have been moulded there. Their social growth has been so gradual that they are unaware of ever having been brought up. And, despite their vastly varied background, they have melted into a national type unknowingly. But I was aware — though there was no tempest in the melting pot —when that boy of mine was being brought up; and more so, even, when I myself was. For I was of age when my social growth suddenly started.

For twenty years I had been alone, a self-sufficient child and youth, hiding myself among mature men, never confiding in anybody, and, therefore, never getting quite hatched, socially. I was mulish when others led me. For I was a leader — not of others, but of myself.

The warm contacts of childhood and adolescence I never knew. My years at child labor in Denmark were secluded, though not at all tedious. I was always capable of entertaining myself: by watching my fingers make and break things; by letting my senses — they were animal in purity — snatch whiffs of beauty out of mother earth; by talking to myself.

My years at sea I also lived alone: in the stokehold, fighting the fires; in the forecastle, reading the Bible and a thousand novels; on shore leave, sightseeing. I liked my own company immensely, and lived aloof. Yet I was not a snob or a sissy. In tropical gales I was sensuous, or when I watched the galloping paws of the engine. My mates had other tastes. Twice they joshed me; and on these two occasions I was ‘sociable’ in the manner of a sailor. For both times I made a wager— and both times I won — that I could drink any of them under the table. After the first spree — that took place at a coal pier in Baltimore before I was seventeen — I even leaped overboard for a swim. Baltimore beer was the first medium, and Jamaica rum the second. To be frank, I lost my dignity after the second spree by poking my head through too small a porthole—‘to watch a shark,’ I told the stokers later — and finding myself thoroughly trapped. The ‘sociable’ ones of the crew did their best, hauling at my legs, before the Chief came to my rescue with chisel and hacksaw.

My child life in the new world was dizzy with wonders — a full and fast and friendless life. I learned to speak American, and I learned to earn a living. But no kin shared my hopes; no friends could I confide in; no homes sheltered me; nobody recognized me. I was alone like Adam and Crusoe — on an isle of three million people.

But I was not lonesome. I loved myself too well for that, though my point of view was not toward my own image — that came later as one of the means of finding myself. I cannot remember many Narcissus delights. But how I did love a chat with myself! My tongue and eyes were my pals. They entertained me.

I was so self-sufficient that my love of life even made me shun sleep. Sleep was dank death; for I never dreamed. That also came later. I lay awake, purposely, far into the night, for the sublime joy of living an extra hour. In the dark I saw too much and too little. My eyes stroked the inner walls of their lids and sockets with various speeds and curves and pressures, etching a hieroglyphic shorthand — my private history — into the tissue.

My tongue was like a revivalist, stretching a sleek body forward and recoiling; stamping on the floor, and hammering on the pulpit; running from wall to wall, and from platform to door; leaping clear to the roof in ecstatic frenzy. It was a revival that lifted me out of languorous sleep and back to things my eyes etched into their lids and sockets — almost as in my first bed in the room above the maker of wooden shoes. I dozed off to death when I kept those eyes of mine steady, and also when I opened the lids in the dark. For then the world vanished. My eyes could no longer ‘feel.’ Where, then, was I?

Alone, a society of one, I climbed the tree of knowledge, straddling on its branches. At Cooper Union applied as well as pure science allured me. And art also. When I beheld an artist make dry-point etchings, my fingers itched to dig their own story into copper. My fingers also itched to revive dead dynamos, and likewise to juggle symbols of electrical theorem.

Yet a prime problem always faced me — to keep myself alive. I climbed alone, a blank asocial animal-man, willing to eat and to love in such a manner that neither I myself nor my neighbor objected. That is to say, willing to curb an eternal hunger spark within, so that it devoured neither my neighbor nor myself. I must eat or die; I must love or die — but socially.

First, food became the medium between myself and society; later, love. I spent all I earned, but no more. Here is my weekly budget: —

The remaining ninety-four cents I saved, until I could buy myself a sixdollar suit, a thirty-nine-cent shirt, a pair of heelless sneakers, and my first straw hat. I had always money to spare for a weekly beer and a solid free lunch, and sometimes even a nickel for church. I darned my own socks, soled my own shoes, cut my own hair, and did my own laundry. But, though I looked quite sociable, I was alone.

Then I found Margaret. Never before had I known of such ideal companionship, nor what vast horizons love could reach. I found another world, the world of love. Men and women became new species. I myself did. Herd habits took root in my primitive heart and sprouted vigorously. They took me by surprise, first as a vague encroachment, then as a blurring fungus growth, on my sharply focused senses, then as a merging of my tongue and eyes with the rest of myself, and finally as a merging of myself with society. There was no longer a cleavage. I lost my tongue and eyes. My own private language is almost dead. The whole of me began to talk — and not only to myself, but to others. I metamorphosed with blinding speed, so that momentum threw me beyond the line. Perhaps it oversocialized me. Compassion almost hurled me out on a tangent.

I climbed down to the ground to live my love life. A desirable fall it was — a fall to social comfort like that of all ancestral apes. On the ground the world was less branched, my curiosity less divided, and my quest more intense. There I grew in a world of two, and later in a larger world of love, until my ego merged with the national ego.

II

She had learned to speak her native language well while she worked as housemaid at the age of fourteen. It was her cultured tongue that I loved first. Later, — at college, — as we romped through the fields and forests of Minnesota, I often marveled at her ease among learned professors. Even our ‘Prexy,’ and his hospitable wife, on two memorable Christmas Eves, delighted in conversing with her. And she chummed with the wives of two deans. How I admired these quiet, kind, cultured Americans!

But I also fell in love with her teeth, and with her tiny hands, and with her fleet foot. She still wins the picnic races. Children worshiped her at first sight. She was faunlike — something of a Minnehaha in form and spirit. Her laughter had a rare, joyous quality. Her eyes were sympathetic, with a tinge of sadness in them. The loss of ‘the dearest of fathers,’ more even than the burden put on her young shoulders thereby, gave her an understanding heart, and made her eyes and voice soothing. She brightened the boarding house from basement to garret. And her charm lasted.

When I began to earn my living here in the new world, I first lived among sailors in cheap rooming houses above the saloons near the Red Hook water front, where whispers about boys being ‘shanghaied’ often reached my ear, and where my eyes beheld the stokers on incoming steamers being plundered by runners. Later I invaded the streets that skirted Columbia Heights, and shared a parlor with many a lodger, once with a child of a crowded Polish family. These were the castaway homes of wealthy Americans — brownstone, parlor-and-basement houses with high frescoed ceilings, Baltimore heaters, and porcelain lavatories.

In one of these I rented a garret from Margaret’s mother. And it was a garret worth describing in detail, for there I first beheld my wife-to-be. Words fail to picture its charm. A long table straddled across the trapdoor above the garret stairs. I had to crawl to get into my garret. At the rear gable two chimneys, warm and blushing, met at the roof — just the nook for my parrots, which an old stoker mate had brought from Brazil. There they lived between the chimneys, climbing a heavy wire mesh which I nailed up in front, Adam praying Spanish and Eve swearing Danish, and both singing ‘In the shade of the old chim-mi-ney.’

On the floor, on a burlap carpet, the two best books in the world — my illustrated Bible and its mate, Webster’s unabridged dictionary — leaned on each other. A pair of quaint rockers, done in black and orange, stood at the ends of the table, which was covered with wool-embroidered burlap, upon which flickered a red candle, stuck into a benedictine bottle. On a collar beam above, and directly under a skylight, hung a brass chandelier, with two tiny blue beady gas flames burning.

From gable to gable ran two rows of prim queen-posts, yoked above by collar beams and steadied below by struts, and meeting the rafters halfway up the roof. Shelves with yards and yards of ownerless books filled the spaces between these queen-posts and formed the sides of my garret. Along the top of the shelves a white yacht raced a tarred two-masted schooner; and an alabaster Apollo chased Daphne within my first baby shirt; and the purple hose of a Turkish pipe embraced a copper jardinière brimful of dry tobacco leaves; and the broad shoulders of a jug of‘Guinea Red’ carried a spherical tumbler turned upside down.

Stuck into a crack on one of the shelves was a blue-and-white porcelain shard — perhaps a part of a broken platter — depicting, if I remember right, two lovers fleeing in a boat on the river; and over their heads two birds, stealing kisses on the wing; and on an isle in the river a bower; and on the mainland a Chinese mansion with a garret; and between the isle and the mainland a bridge, at the foot of which tilted a weeping willow, and over which ran two armed detectives and a pigtailed judge, reading a frightful law book.

In the front gable of my garret was a round window into which the lone morning star smiled like the tear in an eye; and under it a cot. Beyond, God was in his Heaven with the angels.

I repeat, the first time I put eye on Margaret was in my garret. One afternoon I hurried home for my books, which I had forgotten in the morning and which I needed at Cooper Union. The house was empty, but the trapdoor of my garret was open. She was on her knees, scrubbing, and also looking at pictures in my forty-pound Bible. Her hair was fastened up with the charm of a young girl who expects no callers. I stood on the garret stairs — under the table — with my head above the trapdoor. And I dared not crawl up to her, for she had not heard me climb the steps. But suddenly she knew that I was there. She turned her face toward me and stared as though I had risen from the dead. I explained my errand. ‘God!’ she gasped. ‘I thought it was Father.’ I did not know then that her father was dead, or that he had fallen off a roof down upon an iron fence. He had been a roofer. Hurriedly I fetched my books and bowed myself down under the table and down the garret stairs. But after our first meeting my attic was complete in beauty. My heart throve in the joy of living there.

On her sixteenth birthday her mother invited the roomers and boarders to the party. I remember a young rival there, who worked as draftsman in a stoneyard, sketching details for the subway. After that night I wanted to be a draftsman. He was the gamest of sports; and he honored me, there in public, by having me check his sketches of a circular pitch of the Hudson Terminal Station. I did this mathematically, and my pleasure was intense, for it was the only time I ever helped to build a subway.

Other men at the party became my lifelong friends: a bricklayer with a glass eye, who then and almost ever after earned more a day than I a week; a ruddy, bald-headed baker, who bubbled over with mirth, because he was slightly soused; a pale, emaciated peddler of spiritual pamphlets, called ‘the Prophet,’ who literally lived on cold baths, peanuts, and prayers; an effeminate masseur with spats on his ankles, a lavender band on his hat, and a watch on his wrist.

Margaret’s childhood friends were also there. I remember a bright highschool boy — ‘Doc’ they called him — who drove an ice wagon after school hours and now is a noted physician. Never shall I forget a picnic where he blistered my tongue with a wild radish. At the party Margaret’s hand touched him to the quick as he stole a kiss. ‘Starfish,’ she called him, because her fingers left the print of one crawling on his cheek.

Roomers and boarders grouped themselves in a parlor nook to smoke cigars and sip coffee. But I mingled with young and old, for Margaret was everywhere. I played forfeit games and told puns, threw peanut shells and sang ragtime. I gazed through a coat sleeve while ‘Doc’ poured water into it. ‘Starfishing,’ he called the game. Blindfolded I knelt on the floor and swore allegiance to the flag while I bounced my fist, until a girl slid a pan of water under it. I tore half a sleeve off Margaret’s party dress while my teeth picked a match from her puckering lips.

III

Margaret was warned against the sailor in the garret, but the warnings fanned her girlish curiosity into flame. I met her but seldom alone, and could not declare my intentions in front of others.

When I was away she tidied my garret. The air there was full of fragrance from her scrubbing brush, her sun-bleached linen sheets, her oil mop, and a dust cap that she once forgot, which I revered as a fetish. Only during my absence did she crawl into my garret. The ever-toiling widow, being the wise mother of a fair daughter, was not a little worried about males in general and sailors in particular. She and her God brought up the five children, for there was no mother’s pension in those days. Margaret was twelve — and the oldest — when one day the idyllic home was suddenly swept away. A slip of a foot — a grasp at a rotten shingle — a widow — a rooming house — a daughter — and a foreign sailor, who had sailed sixtyseven thousand miles to find just this garret! What years of sorrows and of joys — because of a rotten shingle!

One night I met Margaret on the lower stairway. I struck a match and held it over our heads. She was holding a hand on her heart. I stepped back and remarked in a tone which assured her that she was no child: ‘I would never hurt you in all my life.’ She stood staring at me with a strange mist in her eyes. The match died out. ‘You do look like Father,’ she gasped, and rushed by before I had time to propose marriage. I would take no chance waiting, though I earned only a dollar a day.

On another occasion I fared better. She was taking off her wraps as I entered the hall. She tried to run, but decided to stay. I approached, bowing, and implied that I would be no more intrusive than she herself allowed, giving her time to regain her poise. But I stumbled on a carpet hole and my books flew out from under my arms. She chuckled while she helped me pick them up. Then we stood eyeing each other with tacit intimacy. ‘You like books?’ she asked. ‘Yes, I like books. Will you marry me?’ Her hand leaped to her thumping heart. I almost dodged. The motion reminded me of ‘Doc’ at the party. Without answering she skipped past me and vanished.

In the morning I wrote her a love note, which during the day crawled under the burlap tablecloth. I wrote her a daily love note — short, suggestive epigrams, often quite clever, not always original. It was an unreciprocated correspondence, like my previous prayers at the Holy Rollers. But she read them — for each day they were disarranged.

Then late one night I entered the house in the pitch of night, fatigued by a hard day’s work in sweatshops and by my studies at school. My heart always beat fast when I climbed those stairs. A faint rustle, as of fingers stroking a papered wall, reached my ear. I held my breath and peered into the darkness, waiting halfway up the first flight until the rumble of an ‘L’ train died. I resumed the climb, smiling at myself, when my hand, sliding up the balustrade, stopped. Tiny fingers stroked my hand and hopped away; then, like a warm, pulsating swallow, a hand nestled into mine. It quivered with affection when I pressed it. And then it suddenly flew away into the darkness. There was no whir of wings, nor the slightest rustle. In vain my arms groped through space, touching thick, voluptuous darkness. But in my garret I found a red rose in a vase, above my hidden notes.

On an early Sunday morning I hiked through Prospect Park, where robins hopped on the green lawns, and where fishes in the ponds somersaulted to peek at spring, and where sprouting trees sparkled with dew and looked like brides. I shied off from the beaten road and found myself drifting through a path that wound into untrimmed shrubbery, down along a tall mile-long iron fence, where I met Margaret.

Hand in hand we swung open the gate of Greenwood and skipped into a lane under weeping willows, whose branches chirped with birds and drooped to whisk us close together. She stopped at a grave.

Out of other graves tombstones rose like friendly apparitions, peeking through the shrubbery, whispering a love language all their own: ‘Greater love hath no man than this’; ‘There is no fear in love.’ She glanced around. Sheltered in our first embrace from the eyes of the living, our lips met.

Many secret cemetery trysts did we have on early Sabbath mornings, and also on summer evenings, when the garden of the dead was bathed in moonlight, and foliage, glittering in green tints, rose along with white tombstones like a sea. Deeper into Greenwood we went, finding more secluded nooks, stumbling over hidden fences, nestling close when the hoot of an owl scared us.

Under a statue we cuddled up on polished marble steps — Thorwaldsen’s Christ, spreading out his arms of blessing. The summer breeze carried odors of new-cut clover, lilac bushes, succulent sod, into my nostrils. But nothing was sweeter than the scent of her body. Under the stars her eyes kindled with a limpid glow as my fingers stroked her hair and my lips dabbed her cheeks and browsed in the curves of her throat.

Then the chapel bell shook the night and we leaped up, counting the strokes, racing hand in hand down the lanes, tossing gravel at our shadows.

IV

The following year I entered the better American homes through the kitchen door. The boarding house barely fed the widow and her children. Her rent was high. Margaret became a sales clerk at Loeser’s. But she loved housework and especially cooking, and she hired out to a wealthy Flatbush family. I remember a lonesome couple, a banker and his wife, who were fond of joining our kitchen trysts. They discussed science with me, while Margaret looked on amused, for she always thought they were teasing. They were skillful in arousing my interest — annoyingly so. ‘Prove it!’ was their favorite demand.

I was never sure whether Margaret was right or whether their learning was limited. Two facts of physics they viewed with profound skepticism: that the same iron weight varied in heaviness between the North Pole and the Equator, and that a chunk of coal weighed the same as did the ashes and smoke it produced.

Once Margaret showed them a circular slide rule which I had made myself from strips of celluloid and a piece of cardboard. I could not afford to buy one. The banker put the problem to me: ‘What is twenty-five dollars at eight per cent compound in seventeen years?’ In thirty seconds I had the answer. ‘Jesus,’ was all he said. The two examined the slide rule in silence. Then they vanished into their own domain. Two hours later they returned, fanning their flushed faces with a dozen sheets of close computation. ‘You’re thirteen cents shy!’ they yelled in chorus. Margaret answered: ‘He is worse than that. He is five and a fifth cents too high.’

At their instigation I won a fivedollar wager — and purchased Margaret a ring with a diamond chip. I warned the lonesome couple, but they insisted. The great dispute concerned the shortest crawling distance between a hungry spider and a fat fly in a room, twelve by twelve by thirty feet, the spider being at one end, at a point one foot from the ceiling and six feet from the side walls, and the fly being at the opposite end, at a point one foot from the floor and six feet from the side walls. I said forty feet; they said forty-two. ‘Prove it!’ they shouted. I did. First by mathematics, met with a filibustering, then by clipping a cracker box to scale and spreading it flat. The ring was too large for Margaret’s finger. The jeweler said: ‘For why you should not spend seven-fifty? The smaller the finger, the bigger the diamond, it should be.’ She lost it in a laundry tub. All day long, she tells me, her tears rolled from her cheeks down into purring soapsuds. Some day we shall buy another—but with a pearl.

She hired out as cook at a country estate on the Hudson. Many a Sunday an old, old millionaire bachelor picked me up at the depot in his buggy and drove me up the river bluff into his park. A beaming child in an apron danced among pots and pans, prodding a huge pot roast, and scooping mashed potatoes, and every so often skipping across the floor to watch me turn an ice-cream freezer.

From sanctuaries beyond, a lame housekeeper, and also a buxom Swedish waitress, stole discreet glances. And the gardener’s young assistant peeked through a pane on the rear porch.

Never before in my life had I tasted such morsels; nor had the wealthy bachelor. So he told me seven times on our last ride together. Her muffins, he said, were more efficient than Timothy’s wine. And her prune sauce was rich with kernel flavors.

To this day I utter the names of food with ravenous relish. For Margaret taught me English while I ate. The week long I lived on these meals, and on their names, saving up for another train fare to Cornwall on the Hudson. I was like a famished mongrel. But, ‘No! No! Fold your hands.’ How grateful I was for the brevity of her prayer! ‘Lord, bless our bodies with my good food, and also with thine own good spirit. Amen.’

Dinner over and the dishes in the sink, we climbed out along the Hudson bluffs, leaping over stumps and boulders, dancing through old Indian wood paths and resting our throbbing limbs on the beach, a step from the river, on moss softer than seven Smyrna rugs. My eyes followed the rich colors of her face and my fingers touched her auburn hair, done Madonna fashion.

There again she exclaimed that I looked like her father. Her fingers clung to my wrists, fiercely. But soon she returned to Cornwall on the Hudson. She put her cheek to the ground and stroked it against the moss, and murmured pensively: ‘We’re lying in the hand of God. It is so soft now — His hand is.’

She took off her shoes and stockings and stuck her foot ankle-deep into the same river which flowed at the Broadway canyon, and which had flowed when the Red Man, alone, lived on the land. Eddies caught five timid toes; and also an orbed sole and heel, bridged by a bold arch; and also a slim ankle.

In the dark of night, under the wingspread of two tall, slim catalpa trees, we lay in a hammock, bosom to bosom, pure as the purest of God’s children, strong as the strongest, her toes touching my ankles, her hair my chin, and her young body-line skipping as a shell on water. The trees waltzed, leaning on each other and parting, courting, rollicking to and fro, curtsying solemnly, whispering secrets with a thousand sibilant tongues.

From the gardener’s cottage a man lilted a German lyric. The words, So hold und schön und rein, ring in my ear still. From the manor house the waitress sang a Swedish folk song, and broke the spell of night, suddenly, with a wild, despairing outburst, singing, ‘När jag var sjötton år (When I was seventeen).’ A star followed a path through the thick catalpa foliage; and Margaret hummed the Cardinal’s hymn, ‘Lead, kindly light.’

V

In the fall she returned to Brooklyn, brown as an Indian and with a glow in her eye. She was the same child, yet her kiss was mellower. We went to Manhattan secretly and, just before closing time at City Hall, found the license bureau. There a clerk told us to return to Brooklyn. Borough Hall was the place for us. Our lips drooped. We should be too late. Could he not break the rule, please? ‘Wedding guests are coming,’ I fibbed. He led us into a private office with rugs, mahogany, and curtains, to a man whose voice was gentle, and whose eyes gleamed kindly. Pendergast was his name. I thought he was the mayor.

‘Are we married?’ I asked Margaret, as we stepped out, reading the license together. ‘No. We must find a minister.’ We passed a majestic Broadway church, surrounded by tilting gravestones. But we feared to enter, and looked for other churches, finding none. ‘There is a church on every street of Brooklyn,’ Margaret whispered. And we ran through the canyons and through the Battery, for the ferry.

There, in the Italian quarter on Dean Street, we found a puny little church and, next to it, the parson’s dwelling. ‘Where are your witnesses?’ he asked as we sat down in his office. ‘We have n’t any.’ He looked us over sombrely. ‘Have you a wedding ring for the bride?’ I shook my head. He called his wife from the kitchen — she dropped her apron on his desk — and a young man from the street. Hurriedly he read a page from a book and filled out a large parchment scroll that swarmed with plump and pink baby angels, while the young man from the street wiggled his ears to make Margaret look less solemn.

The same evening we bought a goldfilled ring for a dollar, and a white rose for fifty cents, and two tenderloin steaks at Childs’ for eighty cents. Then we had our photos taken, half a dozen for two dollars. I owned exactly a quarter when I crawled into my garret; and a certificate of marriage — with five signatures — flat on my chest like a cough plaster; and a childwife two flights below.

We found new friends in a young artist and his wife. Already our love world began to grow. Margaret posed for him. A stream of soft white chiffon drape broke on her one shoulder and hung limberly down her nymphean body, meeting at her feet and trailing behind, yet gliding along, rolling and falling from leap to leap, almost pursuing her as she fled down to a wood pond. With brushes, trowels, and paints the artist put her strength on canvas — the girlishness of her spirit, her flow of hair, the health that glowed in her eye, the rhythm in her limbs from toes to fingertips, her firm flesh colors, enriched by her modesty. His wife brought her coffee when goose flesh spoiled the pose; for the studio was chilly.

Nothing is true enough or ever can be. For every star has a million points of view, and so has every atom, and so has love. We reasoned together with our feelings, and, therefore, with primitive harmonies. My garret became her garret. We had faith in the tremors of our knees, and in our warm, unpolluted blood, and in the young curves of our bodies. Like God and pagan and modern youth, we knew of no sin.

Barefooted she came tiptoeing up the garret stairs, as if she rose through the air, appearing in the shadow of the trapdoor and under the straddling table like a beloved bride arisen from the grave, spreading out her white arms with touching confidence for me to give her a lift.

The candle flame flickered in the green D.O.M. bottle, spilling drops of red wax along a frail lead strip that long ago sealed a priestly liqueur. In a homemade wooden frame two roses — a red and a white — pressed their faces against the glass. Two blue, beady gas flames burned steadily above. From the flights below the steady breathing of sleeping men rose to my garret. A mouse thrummed its feet on the resonant floor, speeding by behind the queen-posts. My birds awoke — Margaret spoiled them — and we fed them lump sugar, and sat ourselves down on cushions, our backs against warm chimneys.

At the front gable — outside the round window — the purest of snow, untrampled, glittered on a city of roofs. A star passed by, peered into our garret, smiling, then vanished.

How we did talk during these garret trysts, though we wrote long, daily love letters — not short notes — to each other! These she treasures still, though I have begged her twenty times to burn them all. It was my third winter at the Cooper Union night school and my third year as electrician apprentice. I was earning nine dollars a week and could almost support a wife, immigrant fashion. But why should Margaret live immigrant fashion? She was American. Our garret was cozy — almost as cozy as the home we bought ourselves a dozen years later.

She frightened ‘the Prophet’ once when she passed him in the upper hallway, he from his plunge, she from my garret. ‘ A ghost is haunting this house,’ he told the baker, who replied by pathetic side nods, lifting a finger to his forehead, describing a zero. But one Sunday morning the jovial baker moved. He too had seen the ghost. His bones rattled more than did ‘the Prophet’s,’ Margaret told me later. ‘Whiskey!’ sneered the one-eyed bricklayer. The draftsman whistled, and so did the masseur.

Our secret leaked out. Margaret rushed me off to her aunt. But not until years later, when we returned from the West, college-bred, did the aunt quite forgive us our elopement. She had grown wealthy by then, and handed me a roll of brand-new hundreddollar notes to invest in a home — thirty-nine in all.

Margaret rushed me off to old Uncle John, a rough but solid fellow. In his youth he had been cowpuncher, lumberjack, gold digger. And when the family gathered in solemn conclave to decide my doom he stuck by us. ‘What’s the matter with the fellow? Does he drink? Is he sick? Does n’t he want to work? Did n’t he marry Maggie ? ’

VI

I went West alone—with my toolbag and with a painting wrapped in a silk kimono. A fortnight later — the longest in my life — she came. In Chicago I advanced from shop to office. At sixty dollars a month — as electrical draftsman — we lived and loved luxuriously. Our savings we mailed to Florida; though the returns netted us only a ten-acre swamp, which we never even took title to. That was my fault, however.

Her budget was marvelous: —

Fuel I gathered on Artesian Avenue — tarred paving blocks that had been replaced by asphalt. Margaret trimmed my hair.

Chicago was a city of ‘eats.’ Every feed was a feast, and some were sumptuous revels. The pot roasts Margaret fed me! She always gave me tender, crackling fork nibblings — with pumpernickel, salt, oleomargarine, raw celery — before potatoes and gravy were done. I gobbled the juicy roast and lapped the fork she held, and begged for more until she held out another nibbling and another, at arm’s length — ‘to watch the sheen’ in my eyes, she said.

Perch she fried for me on glowing coals at a swift stream in the outskirts, where we saved a drowning Negro, whose hold made my nose bleed beautifully. Five mud hens we caught, plucked, broiled, and ate one day in the swamps of Cicero. Fried sheep brain we ate at poor Cameille’s — my first Chicago friend, a former priest, but then a factory hand. Plates of prune soup we sponged on ‘broke’ days at Sophie’s boarding house. Turkey we munched and wine we sipped on Christmas Day at old man Birn’s — the foundry foreman. ‘Wieners’ and flyspecked rolls we swallowed — and with relish — at a camp meeting somewhere in the woods, one stiffing summer Sabbath, while Margaret charmed a bishop.

Demi-tasse and pastry we tasted at the parsonage of a French Protestant church, where we went to find Cameille a job as tutor. He was the most learned man I have ever met, and such a helpless child — son of a Polish count and a French countess, born in Paris at the Russian embassy under Alexander the Tsar. The day I went farther West he gave me a sacred book upon which he wrote, in Latin, ‘We die whenever we lose a friend.’ And he gave me a vest-pocket flask in carved brass. With both he had shriven many a dying immigrant.

Gallons of coffee we cooked during the winter, when young people gathered around our kitchen stove, everybody taking turns at chopping tarred paving blocks on a padded drafting board. Eight wedlocks — and lasting ones — we promoted among mail carriers, milkmen, butchers’ and grocers’ clerks, draftsmen, and factory hands, and their respective sweethearts, that first winter.

A lake trip to Ludington stands out as the rarest of honeymoon trips. We were sent as delegates to a church convention there, with steamer fares paid, and board and room for four days free of charge. That week I ate literally barrels of Michigan peaches, which fruit farmers dumped in feeding troughs at the church. The fun we had, Margaret and I, diving for dimes in cold Lake Michigan, while a score of pastors, and a hundred delegates, cheered! And she a month with child!

On our return a storm blew up. At midnight a small gale tossed the steamer in the air like a basket ball. Delegates leaped out of their berths and gathered in the crowded lounging room, singing, ‘Led by Jesus, we are traveling home!’ A seasick pastor asked me how far we were from land. Quick as a flash Margaret responded: ‘I know that joke. Fifty fathoms.’ She was not even seasick in that gale, and after all those peaches. My own stomach was weak — the first time in my life.

Yes, Chicago was a city of ‘eats.’ For three years — every blessed working day — I had starved.

She wanted a child, though she was a child herself, riding horseback at picnics on the shoulders of our parson and bartering scandalous secrets with his daughters. During the months that followed our honeymoon trip I marveled at her spirit.

I was her only nurse. Daily the pastor’s wife, God bless her, dropped in to bathe the baby. It was a cold spring. I tucked the little fellow into a laundry basket next to the kitchen stove, and the night long kept a fire that singed the basket. Once I touched his hand to feel how warm it was. He clasped my finger. What a grip! And he would not let go. I feared to pry open his fist — I might break his fingers. I carried basket and all to Margaret, awaking her from her first mother slumber. She freed my finger — and asked for her breakfast.

Two weeks, and she was at the ‘L’ station to meet me! The boy was riding on her right hip. Thus she always carried him, holding on to him with one arm and swinging the other. People used to stop on the street to look, when she sped by, her small energetic feet stepping with a style entirely her own, and the baby rocking on her limber hip, his back to her. Such happy chums we were, the three of us!

He was nine months old and teething when he bit his mother’s breast. How that human animal raged when we weaned him! We did not have sense enough to wean him gradually. He always grunted before mealtime. ‘H-r-r-u-h! H-r-r-u-h!’ he said. In vain we fed him zwieback and milk, potatoes and gravy, bread and sugar and water. ‘H-r-r-u-h! H-r-r-u-h!’ he said for hours, and looked at us as if we had betrayed him. Our growth had just begun. ‘H-r-r-u-h! H-r-r-u-h!’

(‘Doomsday’ will be the title of the February installment)