O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

V >> Various >> O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919

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Still, it was a cool and serene young daughter who greeted Hosea
Brewster as he came limping up the porch stairs. He placed the flat of
the foot down at each step, instead of heel and ball. It gave him a
queer, hitching gait. The girl felt a sharp little constriction of her
throat as she marked that rheumatic limp. "It's the beastly Wisconsin
winters," she told herself. Then, darting out at him from the corner
where she had been hiding: "S'prise! S'prise!"

His plump blond face, flushed with the unwonted heat went darkly red. He
dropped his hat. His arms gathered her in. Her fresh young cheek was
pressed against his dear, prickly one. So they stood for a long
minute--close.

"Need a shave, dad."

"Well gosh how did I know my best girl was coming!" He held her off.
"What's the matter, Pink? Don't they like your covers any more?"

"Not a thing, Hosey. Don't get fresh. They're redecorating my
studio--you know--plasterers and stuff. I couldn't work. And I was
lonesome for you."

Hosea Brewster went to the open doorway and gave a long whistle with a
little quirk at the end. Then he came back to Pinky in the wide-seated
porch swing. "You know," he said, his voice lowered confidentially, "I
thought I'd take mother to New York for ten days or so. See the shows,
and run around and eat at the dens of wickedness. She likes it for a
change."

Pinky sat up, tense. "For a change? Dad, I want to talk to you about
that. Mother needs--"

Mrs. Brewster's light footstep sounded in the hall. She wore an
all-enveloping gingham apron. "How did you like your surprise, father?"
She came over to him and kissed the top of his head. "I'm getting dinner
so that Gussie can go on with the attic. Everything's ready if you want
to come in. I didn't want to dish up until you were at the table, so's
everything would be hot." She threw a laughing glance at Pinky.

But when they were seated, there appeared a platter of cold, thinly
sliced ham for Pinky, and a crisp salad, and a featherweight cheese
souffle, and iced tea, and a dessert coolly capped with whipped cream.

"But, mother, you shouldn't have--" feebly.

"There are always a lot of things in the house. You know that. I just
wanted to tease you."

Father Brewster lingered for an unwonted hour after the midday meal. But
two o'clock found him back at the cold-storage plant. Pinky watched him
go, a speculative look in her eyes.

She visited the attic that afternoon at four, when it was again neat,
clean, orderly, smelling of soap and sunshine. Standing there in the
centre of the big room, freshly napped, smartly coiffed, blue-serged,
trim, the very concentrated essence of modernity, she eyed with stern
deliberation the funeral wheat wreath in its walnut frame; the trunks;
the chests; the boxes all shelved and neatly inscribed with their "H's
Fshg Tckl" and "Blk Nt Drs."

"Barbaric!" she said aloud, though she stood there alone. "Medieval!
Mad! It has got to be stopped. Slavery!" After which she went downstairs
and picked golden glow for the living-room vases and scarlet salvia for
the bowl in the dining-room.

Still, as one saw Mrs. Brewster's tired droop at supper that night,
there is no denying that there seemed some justification for Pinky's
volcanic remarks.

Hosea Brewster announced, after supper, that he and Fred were going to
have a session with the furnace; she needed going over in September
before they began firing up for the winter.

"I'll go down with you," said Pinky.

"No, you stay up here with mother. You'll get all ashes and coal dust."

But Pinky was firm. "Mother's half dead. She's going straight up to bed,
after that darned old attic. I'll come up to tuck you in, mummy."

And though she did not descend to the cellar until the overhauling
process was nearly completed she did come down in time for the last of
the scene. She perched at the foot of the stairs and watched the two
men, overalled, sooty, tobacco-wreathed and happy. When finally, Hosea
Brewster knocked the ashes out of his stubby black pipe, dusted his
sooty hands together briskly and began to peel his overalls, Pinky came
forward.

She put her hand on his arm. "Dad, I want to talk to you."

"Careful there. Better not touch me. I'm all dirt. G'night, Fred."

"Listen, dad. Mother isn't well."

He stopped then, with one overall leg off and the other on, and looked
at her. "Huh? What d'you mean--isn't well? Mother." His mouth was open.
His eyes looked suddenly strained.

"This house--it's killing her. She could hardly keep here eyes open at
supper. It's too much for her. She ought to be enjoying herself--like
those huge rooms. And you're another."

"Me?" feebly.

"Yes. A slave to his furnace. You said yourself to Fred, just now, that
it was all worn out, and needed new pipes or something--I don't know
what. And that coal was so high it would be cheaper using dollar bills
for fuel. Oh, I know you were just being funny. But it was partly true.
Wasn't it? Wasn't it?"

"Yeh, but listen here, Paula." He never called her Paula unless he was
terribly disturbed. "About mother--you said--"

"You and she ought to go away this winter--not just for a trip, but to
stay. You"--she drew a long breath and made the plunge--"you ought to
give up the house."

"Give up--"

"Permanently. Mother and you are buried alive here. You ought to come to
New York to live. Both of you will love it when you are there for a few
days. I don't mean to come to a hotel. I mean to take a little
apartment, a furnished apartment at first to see how you like it--two
rooms and kitchenette, like a play-house."

Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk. Then around the great
furnace room. "Oh, but listen--"

"No, I want you to listen first. Mother's worn out, I tell you. It isn't
as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn't. She loves the
theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and
concerts."

He broke in again: "Sure; she likes 'em for change. But for a steady
diet--Besides, I've got a business to 'tend to. My gosh! I've got a
business to--"

"You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole
thing--or could, if you'd let him." Youth is cruel like that, when it
wants its way.

He did not even deny it. He seemed suddenly old. Pinky's heart smote her
a little. "It's just that you've got so used to this great barracks you
don't know how unhappy it's making you. Why, mother said to-day that she
hated it. I asked about the attic--the cleaning and all--and she said
that she hated it."

"Did she say that, Paula?"

"Yes."

He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly. His eyes looked
pained and dull. "She did, h'm? You say she did?" He was talking to
himself, and thinking, thinking.

Pinky, sensing victory, left him. She ran lightly up the cellar stairs,
through the first-floor rooms and up to the second floor. Her mother's
bedroom door was open.

A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the
plump, grey-enamel beds. "No, I'm not sleeping. Come here, dear. What in
the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?"

"Talking to dad." She came over and perched herself on the side of the
bed. She looked down at her mother. Then she bent and kissed her. Mrs.
Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp's rosy glow on her face
and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow.
Scarcely a thread of grey in it. "You know, mother, I think dad isn't
well. He ought to go away."

As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow.
As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked
suddenly pinched and old. "What do you mean, Pinky! Father--but he isn't
sick. He--"

"Not sick. I don't mean sick exactly. But sort of worn out. That
furnace. He's sick and tired of the thing; that's what he said to Fred.
He needs a change. He ought to retire and enjoy life. He could. This
house is killing both of you. Why in the world don't you close it up, or
sell it, and come to New York?"

"But we do. We did. Last winter--"

"I don't mean just for a little trip. I mean to live. Take a little
two-room apartment in one of the new buildings--near my studio--and
relax. Enjoy yourselves. Meet new men and women. Live! You're in a
rut--both of you. Besides, dad needs it. That rheumatism of his, with
these Wisconsin winters--"

"But California--we could go to California--"

"That's only a stop-gap. Get your little place in New York all settled,
and then run away whenever you like, without feeling that this great
bulk of a house is waiting for you. Father hates it; I know it."

"Did he ever say so?"

"Well, practically. He thinks you're fond of it. He--"

Slow steps ascending the stairs--heavy, painful steps. The two women
listened in silence. Every footfall seemed to emphasize Pinky's words.
The older woman turned her face toward the sound, her lips parted, her
eyes anxious, tender.

"How tired he sounds," said Pinky; "and old. And he's only--why, dad's
only fifty-eight."

"Fifty-seven," snapped Mrs. Brewster sharply, protectingly.

Pinky leaned forward and kissed her. "Good night, mummy dear. You're so
tired, aren't you?"

Her father stood in the doorway.

"Good night, dear. I ought to be tucking you into bed. It's all turned
around, isn't it? Biscuits and honey for breakfast, remember."

So Pinky went off to her own room (_sans_ "slp cov") and slept soundly,
dreamlessly, as does one whose work is well done.

Three days later Pinky left. She waved a good-bye from the car platform,
a radiant, electric, confident Pinky, her work well done.

"_Au 'voir!_ The first of November! Everything begins then. You'll love
it. You'll be real New Yorkers by Christmas. Now, no changing your
minds, remember."

And by Christmas, somehow, miraculously, there they were, real New
Yorkers; or as real and as New York as anyone can be who is living in a
studio apartment (duplex) that has been rented (furnished) from a lady
who turned out to be from Des Moines.

When they arrived, Pinky had four apartments waiting for their
inspection. She told them this in triumph and well she might, it being
the winter after the war when New York apartments were as scarce as
black diamonds and twice as costly.

Father Brewster, on hearing the price, emitted a long low whistle and
said: "How many rooms did you say?"

Two--and a kitchenette, of course."

"Well, then, all I can say is the furniture ought to be solid gold for
that; inlaid with rubies and picked out with platinum."

But it wasn't. In fact, it wasn't solid anything, being mostly of a very
impermanent structure and style. Pinky explained that she had kept the
best for the last. The thing that worried Father Brewster was that, no
matter at what hour of the day they might happen to call on the
prospective lessor, that person was always feminine and hatted. Once it
was eleven in the morning. Once five in the afternoon.

"Do these New York women wear hats in the house all the time?" demanded
Hosea Brewster worriedly. "I think they sleep in 'em. It's a wonder they
ain't bald. Maybe they are. Maybe that's why. Anyway, it makes you feel
like a book agent."

He sounded excited and tired. "Now, father!" said Mrs. Brewster,
soothingly.

They were in the elevator that was taking them up to the fourth and
(according to Pinky) choicest apartment. The building was what is known
as a studio apartment, in the West Sixties. The corridors were done in
red flagstones, with grey-tone walls. The metal doors were painted grey.

Pinky was snickering. "Now she'll say: 'Well, we've been very
comfortable here.' They always do. Don't look too eager."

"No fear," put in Hosey Brewster.

"It's really lovely. And a real fireplace. Everything new and good.
She's asking two hundred and twenty-five. Offer her one seventy-five.
She'll take two hundred"

"You bet she will," growled Hosea.

She answered the door--hatted; hatted in henna, that being the season's
chosen colour. A small dark foyer, overcrowded with furniture; a studio
living-room, bright, high-ceilinged, smallish; one entire side was
window. There were Japanese prints, and a baby grand piano, and a lot of
tables, and a davenport placed the way they do it on the stage, with its
back to the room and its arms to the fireplace, and a long table just
behind it, with a lamp on it, and books, and a dull jar thing, just as
you've seen it in the second-act library.

Hosea Brewster twisted his head around and up to gaze at the lofty
ceiling. "Feel's if I was standing at the bottom of a well," he
remarked.

But the hatted one did not hear him. "No; no dining-room," she was
saying briskly. "No, indeed. I always use this gate-legged table. You
see? It pulls out like this. You can easily seat six--eight, in fact."

"Heaven forbid!" in fervent _sotto voce_ from Father Brewster.

"It's an enormous saving in time and labour."

"The--kitchen!" inquired Mrs. Brewster.

The hat waxed playful. "You'll never guess where the kitchen is!" She
skipped across the room. "You see this screen?" They saw it. A really
handsome affair, and so placed at one end of the room that it looked a
part of it. "Come here." They came. The reverse side of the screen was
dotted with hooks, and on each hook hung a pot, a pan, a ladle, a spoon.
And there was the tiny gas range, the infinitesimal ice chest, the
miniature sink. The whole would have been lost in one corner of the
Brewster's Winnebago china closet.

"Why, how--how wonderful!" breathed Mrs. Brewster.

"Isn't it? So complete--and so convenient. I've cooked roasts, steaks,
chops, everything, right here. It's just play."

A terrible fear seized upon Father Brewster. He eyed the sink and the
tiny range with a suspicious eye. "The beds," he demanded, "where are
the beds?"

She opened the little oven door and his heart sank. But, "They're
upstairs," she said. "This is a duplex, you know."

A little flight of winding stairs ended in a balcony. The rail was hung
with a gay mandarin robe. Two more steps and you were in the bedroom--a
rather breathless little bedroom, profusely rose-coloured, and with
whole battalions of photographs in flat silver frames standing about on
dressing table, shelf, desk. The one window faced a grey brick wall.

They took the apartment. And thus began a life of ease and gayety for
Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin.

Pinky had dinner with them the first night, and they laughed a great
deal, what with one thing and another. She sprang up to the balcony, and
let down her bright hair, and leaned over the railing, _a la Juliet_,
having first decked Hosey out in a sketchy but effective Romeo costume,
consisting of a hastily snatched up scarf over one shoulder, Pinky's
little turban, and a frying pan for a lute. Mother Brewster did the
Nurse, and by the time Hosea began his limping climb up the balcony, the
turban over one eye and the scarf winding itself about his stocky legs,
they ended by tumbling in a heap of tearful laughter.

After Pinky left there came upon them, in that cozy, little, two-room
apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible
loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room
house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the
winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning a
light-heartedness that neither of them felt.

They lay very still in the little stuffy rose-coloured room and the
street noises of New York came up to them--a loose chain flapping
against the mud guard of a Taxi; the jolt of a flat-wheeled Eighth
Avenue street car the roar of an L train; laughter; the bleat of a motor
horn; a piano in the apartment next door, or upstairs or down.

She thought, as she lay there, choking of the great gracious
grey-and-blue room at home, many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!

He thought, as he lay there, choking, of the gracious grey-blue room at
home; many-windowed, sweet-smelling, quiet. Quiet!

Then, as he had said that night in September: "Sleeping, mother?"

"N-no. Not yet. Just dozing off."

"It's the strange beds, I guess. This is going to be great, though.
Great!"

"My, yes!" agreed Mrs. Brewster, heartily.

They awoke next morning unrefreshed. Pa Brewster, back home in
Winnebago, always whistled mournfully off key, when he shaved. The more
doleful his tune the happier his wife knew him to be. Also, she had
learned to mark his progress by this or that passage in a refrain.
Sometimes he sang, too (also off key), and you heard his genial roar all
over the house. The louder he roared, and the more doleful the tune, the
happier his frame of mind. Milly Brewster knew this. She had never known
that she knew it. Neither had he. It was just one of those subconscious
bits of marital knowledge that make for happiness and understanding.

When he sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament" and came to the passage, "Oh,
take me to the churchyard and lay the sod o-o-over me," Mrs. Brewster
used to say: "Gussie, Mr. Brewster'll be down in ten minutes. You can
start the eggs."

In the months of their gay life in Sixty-seventh Street, Hosey Brewster
never once sang "The Dying Cowboy's Lament," nor whistled "In the Sweet
By-and-By." No; he whistled not at all, or, when he did, gay bits of
jazz heard at the theatre or in a restaurant the night before. He
deceived no one, least of all himself. Sometimes his voice would trail
off into nothingness, but he would catch the tune and toss it up again,
heavily, as though it were a physical weight.

Theatres! Music! Restaurants! Teas! Shopping! The gay life!

"Enjoying yourself, Milly?" he would say.

"Time of my life, father."

She had had her hair dressed in those geometrical, undulations without
which no New York audience feels itself clothed. They saw Pinky less
frequently as time went on and her feeling or responsibility lessened.
Besides, the magazine covers took most of her day. She gave a tea for
her father and mother at her own studio, and Mrs. Brewster's hat,
slippers, gown and manner equalled in line, style, cut and texture those
of any other woman present, which rather surprised her until she had
talked to five or six of them.

She and Hosey drifted together and compared notes.

"Say, Milly," he confided, "they're all from Wisconsin--or
approximately; Michigan and Minnesota, and Iowa, and around. Far's I can
make out there's only one New Yorker, really, in the whole caboodle of
'em."

"Which one?"

"That kind of plain little one over there--sensible looking, with the
blue suit. I was talking to her. She was born right here in New York,
but she doesn't live here--that is, not in the city. Lives in some place
in the country, in a house."

A sort of look came into Mrs. Brewster's eyes. "Is that so? I'd like to
talk to her, Hosey. Take me over."

She did talk to the quiet little woman in the plain blue suit. And the
quiet little woman said: "Oh, dear, yes!" She ignored her r's
fascinatingly, as New Yorkers do". We live in Connecticut. You see, you
Wisconsin people have crowded us out of New York; no breathing space.
Besides, how can one live here? I mean to say--live. And then the
children--it's no place for children, grown up or otherwise. I love
it--oh, yes indeed. I love it. But it's too difficult."

Mrs. Brewster defended it like a true Westerner. "But if you have just a
tiny apartment, with a kitchenette--"

The New York woman laughed. There was nothing malicious about her. But
she laughed. "I tried it. There's one corner of my soul that's still
wrinkled from the crushing. Everything in a heap. Not to speak of the
slavery of it. That--that deceitful, lying kitchenette."

This was the first woman that Mrs. Brewster had talked to--really talked
to--since leaving Winnebago. And she liked women. She missed them. At
first she had eyed wonderingly, speculatively, the women she saw on
Fifth Avenue. Swathed luxuriously in precious pelts, marvelously coiffed
and hatted, wearing the frailest of boots and hose, exhaling a
mysterious heady scent they were more like strange exotic birds than
women.

The clerks in the shops, too--they were so remote, so contemptuous. When
she went into Gerretson's, back home Nellie Monahan was likely to say:
"You've certainly had a lot of wear out of that blue, Mrs. Brewster.
Let's see, you've had it two--three years this spring? My land! Let me
show you our new taupes."

Pa Brewster had taken to conversing with the doorman. That adamantine
individual, unaccustomed to being addressed as a human being, was
startled at first, surly and distrustful. But he mellowed under Hosey's
simple and friendly advances. They became quite pals, these two--perhaps
two as lonely men as you could find in all lonely New York.

"I guess you ain't a New Yorker, huh?" Mike said.

"Me? No."

"Th' most of the folks in th' buildin' ain't."

"Ain't!" Hosea Brewster was startled into it. "They're artists, aren't
they? Most of 'em?"

"No! Out-of-town folks, like you. West, East an' Californy, an' around
there. Livin' here, though. Seem t' like it better'n where they come
from. I dunno."

Hosey Brewster took to eying them as Mrs. Brewster had eyed the women.
He wondered about them, these tight, trim men, rather short of breath,
buttoned so snugly into their shining shoes and their tailored clothes,
with their necks bulging in a fold of fat above the back of their white
linen collar. He knew that he would never be like them. It wasn't his
square-toe shoes that made the difference, or his grey hat, or his baggy
trousers. It was something inside him--something he lacked, he thought.
It never occurred to him that it was something he possessed that they
did not.

"Enjoying yourself, Milly?"

"I should say I am, father."

"That's good. No housework and responsibility to this, is there?"

"It's play."

She hated the toy gas stove, and the tiny ice chest and the screen
pantry. All her married life she had kept house in a big, bounteous way;
apples in barrels; butter in firkins; flour in sacks; eggs in boxes;
sugar in bins; cream in crocks. Sometimes she told herself, bitterly,
that it was easier to keep twelve rooms tidy and habitable than one
combination kitchen-dining-and-living room.

"Chops taste good, Hosey?"

"Grand. But you oughtn't to be cooking around like this. We'll eat out
to-morrow night somewhere, and go to a show."

"You're enjoying it, aren't you, Hosey, h'm?"

"It's the life, mother! It's the life!"

His ruddy colour began to fade. He took to haunting department-store
kitchenware sections. He would come home with a new kind of cream
whipper, or a patent device for the bathroom. He would tinker happily
with this, driving a nail, adjusting a screw. At such times he was even
known to begin to whistle some scrap of a doleful tune such as he used
to hum. But he would change, quickly, into something lovely. The price
of butter, eggs, milk, cream and the like horrified his Wisconsin
cold-storage sensibilities. He used often to go down to Fulton Market
before daylight and walk about among the stalls and shops, piled with
tons of food of all kinds. He would talk to the marketmen, and the
buyers and grocers, and come away feeling almost happy for a time.

Then, one day, with a sort of shock, he remembered a farmer he had known
back home in Winnebago. He knew the farmers for miles around, naturally,
in his business. This man had been a steady butter-and-egg acquaintance,
one of the wealthy farmers in that prosperous farming community. For
his family's sake he had moved into town, a ruddy, rufous-bearded,
clumping fellow, intelligent, kindly. They had sold the farm with a fine
profit and had taken a boxlike house on Franklin Street. He had nothing
to do but enjoy himself. You saw him out on the porch early, very early
summer mornings.

You saw him ambling about the yard, poking at a weed here, a plant
there. A terrible loneliness was upon him; a loneliness for the soil he
had deserted. And slowly, resistlessly, the soil pulled at him with its
black strength and its green tendrils, down, down, until he ceased to
struggle and lay there clasped gently to her breast, the mistress he had
thought to desert and who had him again at last, and forever.

"I don't know what ailed him," his widow had said, weeping. "He just
seemed to kind of pine away."

It was one morning in April--one soft, golden April morning--when this
memory had struck Hosey Brewster. He had been down at Fulton Market.
Something about the place--the dewy fresh vegetables, the crates of
eggs, the butter, the cheese--had brought such a surge of homesickness
to him as to amount to an actual nausea. Riding uptown in the subway he
had caught a glimpse of himself in a slot-machine mirror. His face was
pale and somehow shrunken. He looked at his hands. The skin hung loose
where the little pads of fat had plumped them out.

"Gosh!" he said. "Gosh, I--"

He thought, then, of the red-faced farmer who used to come clumping into
the cold-storage warehouse in his big boots and his buffalo coat. A
great fear swept over him and left him weak and sick.

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