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.
The Camera Eye (45)
the narrow yellow room teems with talk under the low ceiling and crinkling tendrils of cigarettesmoke twine blue and fade round noses behind ears under the rims of women’s hats in arch looks changing arrangements of lips the toss of a bang the wise I-know-it wrinkles round the eyes all scrubbed stroked clipped scraped with the help of lipstick rouge shavingcream razorblades into a certain pattern that implies
this warmvoiced woman who moves back and forth with a throaty laugh head tossed a little back distributing with teasing looks the parts in the fiveoclock drama
every man his pigeonhole
the personality must be kept carefully adjusted over the face
to facilitate recognition she pins on each of us a badge
today entails tomorrow
Thank you but why me? Inhibited? Indeed goodby
the old brown hat flopped faithful on the chair beside the door successfully snatched
outside the clinking cocktail voices fade
even in this elderly brick dwellinghouse made over with green paint orange candles a little tinted calcimine into
Greenwich Village
the stairs go up and down
lead through a hallway ranked with bells names evoking lives tangles unclassified
into the rainy twoway street where cabs slither slushing footsteps plunk slant lights shimmer on the curve of a wet cheek a pair of freshcolored lips a weatherlined neck a gnarled grimed hand an old man’s bloodshot eye
street twoway to the corner of the roaring avenue where in the lilt of the rain and the din the four directions
(the salty in all of us ocean the protoplasm throbbing through cells growing dividing sprouting into the billion diverse not yet labeled not yet named
always they slip through the fingers
the changeable the multitudinous lives)
box dizzingly the compass
Mary French
For several weeks the announcement of a lecture had caught Mary French’s eye as she hurried past the bulletinboard at Hull House: May 15 G. H. Barrow, Europe: Problems of Post-war Reconstruction. The name teased her memory but it wasn’t until she actually saw him come into the lecturehall that she remembered that he was the nice skinny redfaced lecturer who talked about how it was the workingclass that would keep the country out of war at Vassar that winter. It was the same sincere hesitant voice with a little stutter in the beginning of the sentences sometimes, the same informal way of stalking up and down the lecturehall and sitting on the table beside the waterpitcher with his legs crossed. At the reception afterwards she didn’t let on that she’d met him before. When they were introduced she was happy to be able to give him some information he wanted about the chances exsoldiers had of finding jobs in the Chicago area. Next morning Mary French was all of a fluster when she was called to the phone and there was Mr. Barrow’s voice asking her if she could spare him an hour that afternoon as he’d been asked by Washington to get some unofficial information for a certain bureau. “You see, I thought you would be able to give me the real truth because you are in daily contact with the actual people.” She said she’d be delighted and he said would she meet him in the lobby of the Auditorium at five.
At four she was up in her room curling her hair, wondering what dress to wear, trying to decide whether she’d go without her glasses or not. Mr. Barrow was so nice.
They had such an interesting talk about the employment situation which was not at all a bright picture and when Mr. Barrow asked her to go to supper with him at a little Italian place he knew in the Loop she found herself saying yes without a quiver in spite of the fact that she hadn’t been out to dinner with a man since she left Colorado Springs after her father’s death three years ago. She felt somehow that she’d known Mr. Barrow for years.
Still she was a bit surprised at the toughlooking place with sawdust on the floor he took her to, and that they sold liquor there and that he seemed to expect her to drink a cocktail. He drank several cocktails himself and ordered red wine. She turned down the cocktails but did sip a little of the wine not to seem too oldfashioned. “I admit,” he said, “that I’m reaching the age where I have to have a drink to clear the work out of my head and let me relax… That was the great thing about the other side… having wine with your meals… They really understand the art of life over there.”