by Edna Ferber
And that did it. Not that Sophy Decker ever tried to sell you a hat against your judgment, taste, or will. She was too wise a psychologist and too shrewd a businesswoman for that. She preferred that you go out of her shop hatless rather than with an unbecoming hat. But whether you bought or not you took with you out of Sophy Decker’s shop something more precious than any hatbox ever contained. Just to hear her admonishing a customer, her good-natured face all aglow:
“My dear, always put on your hat before you get into your dress.
I do. You can get your arms above your head, and set it right. I put on my hat and veil as soon’s I get my hair combed.”
In your mind’s eye you saw her, a stout, well-stayed figure in tight brassiere and scant slip, bare-armed and bare-bosomed, in smart hat and veil, attired as though for the street from the neck up and for the bedroom from the shoulders down.
The East End set bought Sophy Decker’s hats because they were modish and expensive hats. But she managed, miraculously, to gain a large and lucrative following among the paper-mill girls and factory hands as well. You would have thought that any attempt to hold both these opposites would cause her to lose one or the other. Aunt Sophy said, frankly, that of the two, she would have preferred to lose her smart trade.
“The mill girls come in with their money in their hands, you might say. They get good wages and they want to spend them. I wouldn’t try to sell them one of those little plain model hats. They wouldn’t understand ‘em or like them. And if I told them the price they’d think I was trying to cheat them. They want a hat with something good and solid on it. Their fathers wouldn’t prefer caviar to pork roast, would they? It’s the same idea.”
Her shopwindows reflected her business acumen. One was chastely, severely elegant, holding a single hat poised on a slender stick.
In the other were a dozen honest arrangements of velvet and satin and plumes.
At the spring opening she always displayed one of those little toques completely covered with violets. That violet-covered toque was a symbol.
“I don’t expect ‘em to buy it,” Sophy Decker explained. “But everybody feels there should be a hat like that at a spring opening. It’s like a fruit centerpiece at a family dinner. Nobody ever eats it, but it has to be there.”
The two Baldwin children—Adele and Eugene—found Aunt Sophy’s shop a treasure trove. Adele, during her doll days, possessed such boxes of satin and velvet scraps, and bits of lace and ribbon and jet as to make her the envy of all her playmates. She used to crawl about the floor of the shop workroom and under the table and chairs like a little scavenger.
“What in the world do you do with all that truck, child?” asked Aunt Sophy. “You must have barrels of it.”
Adele stuffed another wisp of tulle into the pocket of her pinafore.
“I keep it,” she said.
When she was ten Adele had said to her mother, “Why do you always say `Poor Sophy’?”
“Because—Aunt Sophy’s had so little in life. She never has married, and has always worked.”
Adele considered that. “If you don’t get married do they say you’re poor?”
“Well—yes–-“
“Then I’ll get married,” announced Adele. A small, dark, eerie child, skinny and rather foreign-looking. The boy, Eugene, had the beauty which should have been the girl’s. Very tall, very blond, with the straight nose and wistful eyes of the Flora of twenty years ago. “If only Adele could have had his looks,” his mother used to say. “They’re wasted on a man. He doesn’t need them, but a girl does. Adele will have to be well dressed and interesting. And that’s such hard work.”
Flora said she worshiped her children. And she actually sometimes still coquetted heavily with her husband. At twenty she had been addicted to baby talk when endeavoring to coax something out of someone. Her admirers had found it irresistible. At forty it was awful. Her selfishness was colossal. She affected a semi-invalidism and for fifteen years had spent one day a week in bed. She took no exercise and a great deal of soda bicarbonate and tried to fight her fat with baths. Fifteen or twenty years had worked a startling change in the two sisters, Flora the beautiful and Sophy the plain. It was more than a mere physical change. It was a spiritual thing, though neither knew nor marked it. Each had taken on weight, the one, solidly, comfortably; the other, flabbily, unhealthily. With the encroaching fat, Flora’s small, delicate features seemed, somehow, to disappear in her face, so that you saw it as a large white surface bearing indentations, ridges, and hollows like one of those enlarged photographs of the moon’s surface as seen through a telescope. A self-centered face, and misleadingly placid. Aunt Sophy’s large, plain features, plumply padded now, impressed you as indicating strength, courage, and a great human understanding.
From her husband and her children, Flora exacted service that would have chafed a galley slave into rebellion. She loved to lie in bed, in an orchid bed jacket with ribbons, and be read to by Adele, or Eugene, or her husband. They all hated it.
“She just wants to be waited on, and petted, and admired,” Adele had stormed one day, in open rebellion, to her Aunt Sophy. “She uses it as an excuse for everything and has, ever since Gene and I were children. She’s as strong as an ox.” Not a daughterly speech, but true.
Years before, a generous but misguided woman friend, coming in to call, had been ushered in to where Mrs. Baldwin lay propped up in a nest of pillows.
“Well, I don’t blame you,” the caller had gushed. “If I looked the way you do in bed I’d stay there forever. Don’t tell me you’re sick, with all that lovely color!”
Flora Baldwin had rolled her eyes ceilingward. “Nobody ever gives me credit for all my suffering and ill-health. And just because all my blood is in my cheeks.”
Flora was ambitious, socially, but too lazy to make the effort necessary for success in that direction.
“I love my family,” she would say. “They fill my life. After all, that’s a profession in itself—being a wife and mother.”
She showed her devotion by taking no interest whatever in her husband’s land schemes; by forbidding Eugene to play football at school for fear he might be injured; by impressing Adele with the necessity for vivacity and modishness because of what she called her unfortunate lack of beauty.
“I don’t understand it,” she used to say in the child’s presence. “Her father’s handsome enough, goodness knows; and I wasn’t such a fright when I was a girl. And look at her! Little dark skinny thing.”
The boy, Eugene, grew up a very silent, handsome, shy young fellow. The girl, dark, voluble, and rather interesting. The husband, more and more immersed in his business, was absent from home for long periods irritable after some of these home-comings; boisterously high-spirited following other trips. Now growling about household expenses and unpaid bills; now urging the purchase of some almost prohibitive luxury. Anyone but a nagging, self-absorbed, and vain woman such as Flora would have marked these unmistakable signs. But Flora was a taker, not a giver. She thought herself affectionate because she craved affection unduly. She thought herself a fond mother because she insisted on having her children with her, under her thumb, marking their devotion as a prisoner marks time with his feet, stupidly, shufflingly, advancing not a step.
Sometimes Sophy, the clear-eyed, seeing this state of affairs, tried to stop it.
“You expect too much of your husband and children,” she said one day, bluntly, to her sister.
“I!” Flora’s dimpled hand had flown to her breast like a wounded thing. “I! You’re crazy! There isn’t a more devoted wife and mother in the world. That’s the trouble. I love them too much.”
“Well, then,” grimly, “stop it for a change. That’s half Eugene’s nervousness—your fussing over him. He’s eighteen. Give him a chance. You’re weakening him. And stop dinning that society stuff into Adele’s ears. She’s got brains, that child. Why, just yesterday, in the workroom, she got hold of some satin and a shape and turned
out a little turban that Angie Hatton–-“
“Do you mean to tell me that Angie Hatton saw my Adele working in your shop! Now, look here, Sophy. You’re earning your living, and it’s to your credit. You’re my sister. But I won’t have Adele associated in the minds of my friends with your hat store, understand? I won’t have it. That isn’t what I sent her away to an expensive school for. To have her come back and sit around a millinery workshop with a lot of little, cheap, shoddy sewing girls! Now, understand, I won’t have it! You don’t know what it is to be a mother. You don’t know what it is to have suffered. If you had brought two children into the world–-“
So, then, it had come about during the years between their childhood and their youth that Aunt Sophy received the burden of their confidences, their griefs, their perplexities. She seemed, somehow, to understand in some miraculous way, and to make the burden a welcome one.
“Well, now, you tell Aunt Sophy all about it. Stop crying, Della. How can I hear when you’re crying! That’s my baby. Now, then.”
This when they were children. But with the years the habit clung and became fixed. There was something about Aunt Sophy’s house—the old frame house with the warty stucco porch. For that matter, there was something about the very shop downtown, with its workroom in the rear, that had a cozy, homelike quality never possessed by the big Baldwin house. H. Charnsworth Baldwin had built a large brick mansion, in the Tudor style, on a bluff overlooking the Fox River, in the best residential section of Chippewa. It was expensively furnished. The hall console alone was enough to strike a preliminary chill to your heart.
The millinery workroom, winter days, was always bright and warm and snug. The air was a little close, perhaps, and heavy, but with a not unpleasant smell of dyes and stuffs and velvet and glue and steam and flatiron and a certain racy scent that Julia Gold, the head trimmer, always used. There was a sociable cat, white with a dark-gray patch on his throat and a swipe of it across one flank that spoiled him for style and beauty but made him a comfortable-looking cat to have around. Sometimes, on very cold days, or in the rush season, the girls would not go home to dinner, but would bring their lunches and cook coffee over a little gas heater in the corner. Julia Gold, especially, drank quantities of coffee. Aunt Sophy had hired her from Chicago. She had been with her for five years. She said Julia was the best trimmer she had ever had. Aunt Sophy often took her to New York or Chicago on her buying trips. Julia had not much genius for original design, or she never would have been content to be head milliner in a small-town shop. But she could copy a fifty-dollar model from memory down to the last detail of crown and brim. It was a gift that made her invaluable.
The boy, Eugene, used to like to look at Julia Gold. Her hair was very black and her face was very white, and her eyebrows met in a thick dark line. Her face as she bent over her work was sullen and brooding, but when she lifted her head suddenly, in conversation, you were startled by a vivid flash of teeth and eyes and smile. Her voice was deep and low. She made you a little uncomfortable. Her eyes seemed always to be asking something. Around the worktable, mornings, she used to relate the dream she had had the night before. In these dreams she was always being pursued by a lover. “And then I woke up, screaming.” Neither she nor the sewing girls knew what she was revealing in these confidences of hers. But Aunt Sophy, the shrewd, somehow sensed it.
“You’re alone too much, evenings. That’s what comes of living in a boardinghouse. You come over to me for a week. The change will do you good, and it’ll be nice for me, too, having somebody to keep me company.”
Julia often came for a week or ten days at a time. Julia, about the house after supper, was given to those vivid splashy negligees with big flower patterns strewn over them. They made her hair look blacker and her skin whiter by contrast. Sometimes Eugene or Adele or both would drop in and the four would play bridge. Aunt Sophy played a shrewd and canny game, Adele a rather brilliant one, Julia a wild and disastrous hand, always, and Eugene so badly that only Julia would take him on as a partner. Mrs. Baldwin never knew about these evenings.
It was on one of these occasions that Aunt Sophy, coming unexpectedly into the living room from the kitchen, where she and Adele were foraging for refreshments after the game, beheld Julia Gold and Eugene, arms clasped about each other, cheek to cheek. They started up as she came in and faced her, the woman defiantly, the boy bravely. Julia Gold was thirty (with reservations) at that time, and the boy not quite twenty-one. “How long?” said Aunt Sophy, quietly. She had a mayonnaise spoon and a leaf of lettuce in her hand then, and still she did not look comic.
“I’m crazy about her,” said Eugene. “We’re crazy about each other. We’re going to be married.”
Aunt Sophy listened for the reassuring sound of Adele’s spoons and plates in the kitchen. She came forward. “Now, listen–-” she began.
“I love him,” said Julia Gold, dramatically. “I love him!”
Except that it was very white and, somehow, old-looking, Aunt Sophy’s face was as benign as always. “Now, look here, Julia, my girl. That isn’t love, and you know it. I’m an old maid, but I know what love is when I see it. I’m ashamed of you, Julia. Sensible woman like you, hugging and kissing a boy like that, and old enough to be his mother.”
“Now, look here, Aunt Sophy! If you’re going to talk that way–- Why, she’s wonderful. She’s taught me what it means to really–-“
“Oh, my land!” Aunt Sophy sat down, looking suddenly very ill.
And then, from the kitchen, Adele’s clear young voice: “Heh! What’s the idea! I’m not going to do all the work. Where’s everybody?”
Aunt Sophy started up again. She came up to them and put a hand— a capable, firm, steadying hand—on the arm of each. The woman drew back, but the boy did not.
“Will you promise me not to do anything for a week? Just a week! Will you promise me? Will you?”
“Are you going to tell Father?”
“Not for a week, if you’ll promise not to see each other in that week. No, I don’t want to send you away, Julia, I don’t want to… . You’re not a bad girl. It’s just—he’s never had—at home they never gave him a chance. Just a week, Julia. Just a week, Eugene. We can talk things over then.”
Adele’s footsteps coming from the kitchen.
“Quick!”
“I promise,” said Eugene. Julia said nothing.
“Well, really,” said Adele, from the doorway, “you’re a nervy lot, sitting around while I slave in the kitchen. Gene, see if you can open the olives with this fool can opener. I tried.”
There is no knowing what she expected to do in that week, Aunt Sophy; what miracle she meant to perform. She had no plan in her mind. Just hope. She looked strangely shrunken and old, suddenly. But when, three days later, the news came that America was to go into the war she had her answer.
Flora was beside herself. “Eugene won’t have to go. He isn’t old enough, thank God! And by the time he is it will be over. Surely.” She was almost hysterical.
Eugene was in the room. Aunt Sophy looked at him and he looked at Aunt Sophy. In her eyes was a question. In his was the answer. They said nothing. The next day Eugene enlisted. In three days he was gone. Flora took to her bed. Next day Adele, a faint, unwonted color marking her cheeks, walked into her mother’s bedroom and stood at the side of the recumbent figure. Her father, his hands clasped behind him, was pacing up and down, now and then kicking a cushion that had fallen to the floor. He was chewing a dead cigar, one side of his face twisted curiously over the cylinder in his mouth so that he had a sinister and crafty look.
“Charnsworth, won’t you please stop ramping up and down like that! My nerves are killing me. I can’t help it if the war has done something or other to your business. I’m sure no wife could have been more economical than I have. Nothing matters but Eugene, anyway. How could he do such a thing! I’ve given my whole life to my children–-“
H. Charnsworth kicked the cushion again so that
it struck the wall at the opposite side of the room. Flora drew her breath in between her teeth as though a knife had entered her heart.
Adele still stood at the side of the bed, looking at her mother. Her hands were clasped behind her, too. In that moment, as she stood there, she resembled her mother and her father so startlingly and simultaneously that the two, had they been less absorbed in their own affairs, must have marked it.
The girl’s head came up stiffly. “Listen. I’m going to marry Daniel Oakley.”
Daniel Oakley was fifty, and a friend of her father’s. For years he had been coming to the house and for years she had ridiculed him. She and Eugene had called him Sturdy Oak because he was always talking about his strength and endurance, his walks, his rugged health; pounding his chest meanwhile and planting his feet far apart. He and Baldwin had had business relations as well as friendly ones.
At this announcement Flora screamed and sat up in bed. H. Charnsworth stopped short in his pacing and regarded his daughter with a queer look; a concentrated look, as though what she had said had set in motion a whole mass of mental machinery within his brain.
“When did he ask you?”
“He’s asked me a dozen times. But it’s different now. All the men will be going to war. There won’t be any left. Look at England and France. I’m not going to be left.” She turned squarely toward her father, her young face set and hard. “You know what I mean. You know what I mean.”
Flora, sitting up in bed, was sobbing. “I think you might have told your mother, Adele. What are children coming to! You stand there and say, `I’m going to marry Daniel Oakley.’ Oh, I am so faint … all of a sudden … Get the spirits of ammonia.”
Adele turned and walked out of the room. She was married six weeks later. They had a regular prewar wedding—veil, flowers, dinner, and all. Aunt Sophy arranged the folds of her gown and draped her veil. The girl stood looking at herself in the mirror, a curious half smile twisting her lips. She seemed slighter and darker than ever.
