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.