Comedy_American Style

by Jessie Redmon Fauset

  Already by being her heady, vital wayward self, she had crossed thresholds, had received in her own tiny jewel of an apartment, in Harlem, personages whom Olivia, in order to meet, would cheerfully have thrown away her hope of heaven. . . .

  Mrs. Cary rather welcomed Teresa’s undiminished friendship with Phebe. Back in her mind’s eye she still bore the picture of Phebe walking trig and chic out Spruce Street with young Llewellyn Nash, “social registerite,” lounging by her side. . . . Impossible to tell what might happen. . . .

  Oliver, happy at home with his father, Christopher, Teresa and his precious piano, rarely felt the need of company. . . . When he did he visited the homes of a few understanding lads, compensating for his own remissness in hospitality with invitations to movies, or passes obtained from his father to baseball games.

  No one in colored Philadelphia society ever bore any resentment against the Cary children. Unerringly the blame for their lop-sided social life was placed where it belonged—on their mother. For years they had been without colored servants; they lived in an exclusively white section; but their tastes, failings, leanings, predilections had all been catalogued, revised, brought up to date with astonishing and vigilant precision by colored people whom they had never seen.

  In the spring of that school year, Christopher asked Teresa if she would consider some tutoring in beginning French. Two of his “buddies, fine fellows, Tess,” were hopelessly behind. There was a possibility of their being dropped off some team without which it seemed the whole University of Pennsylvania would cease to flourish . . . the situation was intolerable. The boys hadn’t much money. Christopher, ardent sportsman, had remembered, just in the nick of time, his sister’s interest and her fine scholastic record in the subject.

  “How about taking them on, Tess, for the sake of old Alma Mater?”

  “Aren’t you getting a bit confused? Penn isn’t my Alma Mater, you know. . . . Why, yes, I might lend the suffering sailors a little aid. Do they know anything at all?”

  “Not even the accents,” he answered cheerfully. “I doubt if they could even say ‘yes’ in French; not if their lives depended on it.”

  “But goodness gracious, Chris, they must know something. . . .”

  “You’d be surprised. . . .” He rushed to the telephone shouting, as soon as he got his number, some cryptic nickname: “Come on over, Dinty, and bring the other visiting firemen. I’ve fixed it. . . .”

  They trooped in, four of them. Big stocky fellows all muscle and brawn. Teresa had never done a moment’s tutoring in her life. But she knew what these boys needed.

  “First of all,” she asked them, “are you in earnest? Because it’s simply no go if you aren’t.”

  “Are we in earnest?” echoed the one they called Dinty, a huge white-haired giant. “And how!”

  They were slow; their preparation in fundamentals painfully inadequate. Evidently they had never done any real studying at all except to stay in schools in order that they might remain as members of their favorite teams.

  That was the desire that actuated them now and it was on this desire that Teresa most depended. . . . She taught them, as one teaches children, by repetition, by memory tricks, almost, one might say, by pre-digestion. . . . It was useless to give them a page in grammar for their own enlightenment and absorption.

  But she did accomplish what seemed well nigh the impossible. Everyone of them passed his mid-term examination in this, the subject that he hated and feared most. . . .

  “Some teacher,” said Buck Owens, stopping by the house for one final crow of triumph before entraining to play a monumental game against some rival team in the hinterland of Pennsylvania. “How’d you like to take us on for good, Teresa? I know lots of fellows that would pay good money to have a teacher like you.”

  She’d consider it, she told him. . . . The work had taken her out of herself, completely absorbed her. . . . It was rather nice to make even the scanty dollars which they had been able to pay. . . . Wouldn’t it be rather wonderful, she thought to herself, to earn her living in this pleasant way? Not only need she be of no additional expense to her father, she could take herself completely off his hands.

  The house was large; there was an unused room on the third floor which could easily be fitted up with blackboards and charts and maps for teaching. . . . If she were at all successful she might at the end of a year introduce phonograph records for accent and intonation. Why she would be a business woman, like Phebe and Marise! Here was a calling right to her hand which she could pursue until she married. . . .

  Marriage! The word brought a wry taste to her mouth. It made her, for one sickening moment, think of Henry . . . thus she might have helped him! How far away all that seemed!

  Resolutely she bent to a further consideration of her project. When Christopher came in that afternoon she told him about it—half fearing his hoot of derision at the idea of her setting herself up to be a business woman.

  He did greet her plan with a shout, but it was with a shout of approval. “Say, that’s really great! Say, that’s the best scheme I’ve heard of yet! And it’ll keep you home too, won’t it, Sis? . . . I’m as bad as Oliver when you’re away.” . . .

  “Don’t try to softsoap me, my lad. You only say that because I make you extra waffles when you sleep late on Saturday mornings! How about my missing you when you go off? Would all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men keep you from going to camp this summer even though it might save me gallons of bitter tears?”

  He began with typical male defence: “That’s different . . .” then broke off, to stare at her with ludicrous amazement, running his supple, freckled hands through his splendid, burnished hair.

  She stared back at him. “Christopher, don’t stand there looking at me like that. What’s come over you?”

  He pushed her back in an arm-chair. “Listen, Tessie, listen to your big brother. . . . What say you get Father to let you go abroad this summer to one of those tricky little summer schools in France? Not the Sorbonne. I imagine from things I’ve heard fellows say that Paris would be too strenuous for you right now, but Grenoble or Clermont sur Ferrand, or Dijon or the University of Toulouse? There’s a good one . . . Southern France, hot maybe, but not too far from the sea. . . . Then you could come back with one of those cute little certificates and hang it up in your classroom. . . . You really could do it several summers. . . .”

  “Chris, I do believe that’s an idea! Only I hate to ask Dad for money and I hate to leave Oliver alone, poor baby!”

  “Baby nothing! Oliver can go with me; time he got some hardness knocked into him anyway. Always mooning about music and the stars and poetry. I’ll make a heman out of that lad yet. . . . As for expense! Evidently you don’t know that your brother is going to be a counsellor. Yes, ma’am, counsellor, that’s me. So I won’t be asking a thing of Dad, not even carfare. He’ll be glad to drive us up and come back and get us. Or we might even hitchhike.”

  After their father had come in they discussed it at dinner that night. He would have tried his best to procure the moon for Teresa if it would restore to her even a tenth of the fervor and enthusiasm which this scheme seemed to awaken. Of course she could go, he told her.

  “But Dad, I hate to ask you for the money.”

  So then they talked it all over again, how they could save here, how the car could be made to hold out another season; how the boys would hitch-hike if their father couldn’t find time to drive them up.

  Dr. Cary politely asked his wife what she thought of it. A person of very strong tendencies, she turned out to be on this occasion, surprisingly noncommittal. Teresa, she thought, should be careful not to overtax her strength. . . . Furthermore who knew whether those harum-scarum boys meant what they had said about coming to her for further work, let alone bringing her new pupils.

  Her comments established a new point of departure. If enough pupils turned up to make her consider tutoring as a serious interest for the fall, she would, Teresa
decided, go away for three months’ intensive study and the piece of paper whose importance Christopher so emphasized.

  One could always get a sailing at the last moment, her mother observed. Mrs. John Sturtevant, who was on the sub-committee of the Welfare Center of which she was a member, had been talking to her about that only yesterday.

  Mention of Mrs. Sturtevant, one of the world’s doughtiest club-women, chilled momentarily the children’s ardor. All of Olivia’s colleagues being, except in weight, remarkably nebulous creatures with whom the children had, because of their racial proclivities, practically no contact. . . .

  Then Oliver began to talk of the joys of camp. He hoped they would have an archery outfit. . . . He wanted to learn to shoot, though he would never, never take aim at a bird; but more than anything else he wanted to be an archer. “Archery is the poetry of . . . of . . .”

  “Ballistics,” said his father kindly.

  “Of ballistics,” Oliver repeated rather warily.

  “Pshaw!” said Christopher lunging at him. “Don’t you start any of that poetry business around me. . . . You don’t know what you’re talking about, and I know it and you know it. . . . Trip him, Tess. Don’t let him get away.”

  Even Dr. Cary took part in the young riot which followed.

  Only Olivia was quiet, biding her time.

  CHAPTER XIII

  BUCK and Dinty and their other friends of like cognomen were, it turned out, in earnest. After the spring vacation they came back straight as a die to Teresa, relying, rather pathetically and with no shadow of pretense, on the young girl’s ability. . . . They brought other young men with them. “She’ll get you through,” they told the newcomers, owlishly nodding and with great assurance.

  There were a dozen of them in all. She was surprised herself, not only that she could manage them but at the manner in which her mind began to devise scheme and method both to lighten her work for herself and yet to make it impressive for them. . . . By the end of the term her mind was made up. Only one boy had failed and he himself had admitted the dubiousness of his state when he first enrolled. . . . Three of the remaining eleven passed with considerable credit. . . . Her success brought her new life, new determination. She thought again of Alicia’s interest in Bacteriology, of Marise and her success on the stage, of Phebe and her shop.

  This was great, this was wonderful to be busy, to be useful, to have her mind and her capabilities, hitherto so latent, so unsuspected, stretching out, out. Of course she would go abroad. She knew just the value, just the cachet that that fact would lend to her classes.

  Chris had been right there. . . , Darling Chris! Perhaps she could help him . . . there was still a long pull for him through medical school. In that way she could help her father. . . . Reviewing the matter with more practicality, she began to see that her business would hardly extend to this point in time to be really effective. . . . But she could help with Oliver! That was it, she would educate Oliver. She told her father about it.

  With the special tenderness which he reserved for his only girl he listened to her. “Dear child! Don’t think of it! All I want is for you to be amused and busy!”

  “Amused!” The idea struck her oddly. “Why, Daddy, how strange! As though amusement were the only thing!”

  “It’s a mighty big thing,” he told her gravely, a trifle wearily, it seemed to her, reflecting suddenly how little amusement he had probably known. . . . She put her arm about his neck, rested her slight weight for a moment on his knee. “Dr. Christopher Cary, listen. I am going to educate Oliver; no, first I’m going to take care of myself; then I’m going to educate Oliver, then lastly, most important, and always, I’m going to amuse you.” She thought his face brighter, his shoulders straighter as he left that morning to go on his rounds.

  “He’s still a young man, . . . for a father,” she said to herself in her room. She calculated a little. “Why, he’s only forty-six . . . not too old for a good time yet. Look at those movie-actors, forty-five and fifty and older, still going strong! Well, I’ll see he has some fun some of these days. Amusement! Darned little he’s had of it with Mother, I know!”

  About a week before it was time for her to sail Olivia approached her husband with considerable cautiousness. “How does Teresa’s health strike you now, Doctor?” she asked anxiously. “I’ve been watching her rather closely, and I notice that she tires easily, lies down a good bit. I’ve been wondering,” she added with studied diffidence, “whether it wouldn’t be best for you to go with her?”

  He was shaving, as he so often provokingly did, in front of her dressing table . . . she would have all that litter to clear away.

  He turned a startled face toward her. “I go with her! Why, Olivia, what are you talking about? . . . In the first place I’m not thinking . . . I’m not thinking, I tell you, of letting another man get a thumb-nail hold on my practice. . . . I haven’t been bothering you or the children about it . . . but good God, don’t you ever read the papers? Why, the country is in an awful mess. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, things are going to strike a new low. And the first class of people to feel it will be your professional man . . . especially your colored professional man. . . .

  “And anyway suppose I could go. What would I be doing fooling around some girls’ school, waiting for my daughter to recite her lessons and then go off on a tour of sight-seeing? . . . No, I was in France once, that was enough for me. No decent coffee, or cigarettes . . . and those newspapers! I can’t imagine the poorest little old town in Texas getting out a paper like some of those I’ve seen in Paris. . . .” He gathered up his shaving implements and barricaded himself in the bath-room.

  But she had, and she knew it, impressed him.

  “She is a little more tired and nervous than I realized,” he said to his wife that night, taking off his collar and tie and flinging them, as he always did, at the first objective. . . . “I watched her this evening. Maybe we shouldn’t have let her go into this teaching business so hard. . . . Listen, Olivia, why can’t Sally put my slippers in the same place? She seems to think she must always play a game with me. . . .

  “I’m afraid to interfere with her going now; she’s set her heart on it so . . . guess you’ll have to go with her.”

  Olivia kept her voice perfectly expressionless. “I don’t see how I can do that, Doctor . . . I’ve halfway promised Mrs. John Sturtevant to go to Los Angeles with her to a convention. She’s going to take her chauffeur and car. . . . But anyway I doubt very much if Teresa would want me to go. . . . But of course I’ll have to if you think it best.”

  He said guiltily, busy with his own thoughts: “Of course she’ll want you to go. I’ll fix it.” But in his heart he was thinking boyishly: “Gosh, if I’d only known about this Los Angeles business! I’d have got Teresa to put off going abroad until the fall and take her and the boys and go bumming in this old car before I turned her in. I’d get Pete Slocum and we’d do some hunting and fishing and camp wherever we were.”

  Well it was too late for all that now.

  CHAPTER XIV

  TERESA took the news of her mother’s going with more equanimity than anyone had expected. Suddenly let down from the excitement and novelty of her pupils she was tired, lonely and dispirited. Thoughts which she had deemed forever dismissed came crowding upon her. . . . It was June again. . . . This time last year, she and Henry had been in the midst of their buoyant planning. . . .

  She reviewed once more the tragic and foolish dissolution of all for which she had so hoped. . . . Strange how completely he who once had so filled her life, had now left it. . . . After long weeks of silence Alicia had written . . . several times but she had mentioned young Bates only once . . . to say that he had gone to Panama and that she never heard from him. . . . After that she tabooed his name completely.

  Consequently Teresa never mentioned it either. Impossible to tell just what stand Alicia had taken toward the affair . . . there were so many angles from which Henry might have presente
d it, if indeed in his sorely wounded pride he had discussed the matter at all. . . . Teresa remembered Alexander Barrett’s remark on this subject. “Colored people are funny, you know, about this business of passing.”

  She was tired of her thoughts, tired of her memories, tired to death of her tiredness. . . . She was glad to be getting away from it all; glad not to have on her hands either the responsibility of choosing the clothes to take, of packing them, of selecting, refusing, triumphantly accepting a particular stateroom.

  They sailed on the S.S. Paris . . . second class. Nothing, no promise, no spoken word from her mother could more completely have allayed the last lurking suspicions which Teresa might have entertained concerning the older woman’s plans. . . . Usually she insisted on every manifestation of pomp and circumstance which she considered at all consonant with her husband’s pocket-book. . . . Instead she herself suggested unexpected economies, “since the two of us are going.”

  Also there were suggestions about clothes. It was indeed Dr. Cary who broached the idea of the purchase of one or two Paris frocks for his girl. . . . Olivia said she would leave this entirely to Teresa. “For myself,” she said, “I find French styles greatly over-rated. I think we can do just as well in New York. But unless we run across some real bargains, why buy anything until the fall? Teresa has plenty of dresses, nice ones left over from school.”

  Which was indeed true. For shopping for the necessities of that lost romance, Teresa, planning to be of as little expense as possible to Henry, had equipped herself most fully. . . . Her illness during the ensuing year had lessened greatly her necessity for new clothes so that she was taking with her on the trip many garments which she had never donned.

  She liked the sea-trip. She liked the free-masonry which it engendered; she liked to watch the amazing lack of restraint which young America displays when she gets on, so to speak, her sea-legs. . . . All sorts of people on this boat too besides Americans. French people returning with unrestrained joy from perpetually unwelcome exile; South Americans, swarthy, wary, a trifle too urbane, asking few questions, listening attentively to the answers, volunteering nothing enlightening about themselves; retiring, when questioned about themselves, into a sudden baffling non-comprehension of English.