Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [77]
Mother might have withstood all of this if a debate did not rise concerning the family’s sheltering of Coalhouse Walker’s son. A steady parade of cars came up the hill in the long evenings as sightseers craned their necks for a glimpse of a face in the window. An official of the Child Welfare Board in New York gave the opinion that the still-unchristened illegitimate child should be given over to one of the excellent asylums that existed for the care of orphans, waifs and children born out of wedlock. Mother kept the baby in her room. She would no longer take him downstairs. She enlisted her son to watch over him when she had to see to something. She did not take the time to put her hair up but let it hang to her shoulders all day. She was uncharacteristic in her bitterness toward Father. Why don’t you unlock your treasure chest, she said, and get me some proper help. This was a reference to his financial conservatism which she had never before questioned. Always they had lived less well than he could afford. Father was stung by the remark but he went out and found a woman to do the cooking and another woman to be laundress and housemaid, both to live in. He hired the man who had been the part-time gardener and installed him in the rooms above the garage stable. Grandfather already had a registered nurse to tend him in the day. The house, under siege, now bustled like a wartime camp. The boy was constantly admonished to get out from under people’s feet. He watched his mother pace her room, her hands clasped in front of her, her unbound hair hanging down the sides of her face. She looked gaunt, and her chin, which had always inclined to roundness, seemed ungenerous, even pointed.
It was clear the crisis was driving the spirit from their lives. Father had always felt secretly that as a family they were touched by an extra light. He felt it going now. He felt stupid and plodding, available simply to have done to him what circumstances would do. Coalhouse ruled. Yet he had been to the Arctic, to Africa, to the Philippines. He had traveled out west. Did that mean only that more and more of the world resisted his intelligence? He sat in his study. Everyone he thought about, even Grandfather, he saw in terms of his own failed concern. He had treated Grandfather with the arrogant courtesy one gives to the senile even before the condition had set in. From Younger Brother he was completely estranged. Toward his wife he felt drastically slipped in her estimation, an explorer in body only, the spirit trapped in his own father’s prejudices. He was beginning to look like him, too, going dry and juiceless in everything, with a mad glint showing in the corner of his eye. Why did that have to be?
He condemned himself most for the neglect of his son. He never talked to the boy or offered his companionship. He had always relied on his presence in the child’s life as a model for emulation. How smug that was, how stupid, as the tactic of a man who had acted in his life to distinguish himself from his own father. He looked for the boy and found him on the floor of his room reading in the evening paper an account of the successful play of the New York baseball nine under the masterful coaching of John J. McGraw. Would you like to see that team? he said. The boy looked up, startled. I was just thinking of it, he said. Father went to Mother’s room. Tomorrow, he announced, I am taking the boy to see a game of baseball. He said this with such resolve in its rightness that she was checked in her response, which was to condemn him for an idiot, and when he left the room she could only wonder that she had had that thought in the first place, so separated from any feeling of love.
30
The next afternoon, when father and son left the house, two reporters followed them part of the way on their brisk walk to the railroad station on Quaker Ridge Road. We’re going to the Giants baseball game,