The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [26]
Cyril Monday had originated in Malvern, Arkansas, and so had Elsie. Malvern was in the flat timberlands southwest of the capital, and Cyril, although he liked to claim that he was a “self-made” man, was the son of a prosperous lumber baron, who, however, had insisted that each of his sons attend “the College of Hard Knocks.” So Cyril at seventeen became a driver for the stagecoach that ran from the depot to the resort spa at Hot Springs. One of his regular passengers was the Little Rock banker Henry T. Worthen, who took young Cyril under his wing, persuaded him to move to Little Rock, and gave him a job in his bank. Within five years Cyril had risen from clerk to teller to vice-president. “But never more than that,” Viridis told me. “All of my growing-up years I had to listen to my father complain that he was not ever going to realize his ambition to become president of the bank. He was a very frustrated man.”
Cyril Monday may have remained only a frustrated vice-president for all of his working life, but he was a very wealthy one, and he and his family were “comfortable”—a word then meaning without a care in this world, except that Elsie was often in poor health, and when she wasn’t spending long periods in Hot Springs taking one “cure” or another, sometimes for addiction to drink, she was convalescing at home, not bedridden but spending most of the time in her garden, which covered nearly half an acre behind the Monday mansion. “In good weather, if I wanted to speak to my mother,” Viridis told me, “I tried the garden first. If my mother wasn’t there, she was in Hot Springs. I was seventeen and in college before it suddenly dawned on me that my mother had never had any friends.”
Henry Worthen once suggested to Cyril Monday that he would never become president, of the bank or of any of the civic and fraternal organizations to which he belonged, unless and until his wife Elsie began to “entertain.” Cyril Monday did not apologize for Elsie. Some women, he felt, were not cut out to entertain, and he himself was not fond of large dinner parties at which a fortune was spent on food that remained unappreciated because the eater was too busy either trying to keep stains off his or her clothing or else carrying on a conversation to pay any attention to what was being eaten.
Nor did the girls, Viridis and Cyrilla, do any entertaining in the form of inviting friends to come to the Monday mansion for food or play or casual conversation. Cyrilla was almost as delicate as her mother, and in fact she began at the age of twelve to accompany her mother on the regular cures to Hot Springs. What social life existed at all within the confines of the Queen Anne house was that of the three sons Matthew, Dallas, and Henry, who frequently invited their classmates to come and visit, to explore the countless cupboards and crannies of the endless house, to play croquet or badminton on the lawns, to shoot billiards on the third floor, to climb even higher into the fifth floor of the domed turret and shoot pigeons on the roof.
“I remember the house as being overrun by males,” Viridis said to me. “When my mother and sister were gone to Hot Springs for long stretches, and my three brothers had three or more of their friends spending the night or longer, I had no one to talk to except my father, and he had very little time to listen to me, although we did spend much time together, evenings especially.”
(It is hard for me to get out of the habit of thinking of “evening” as meaning “afternoon,” as it always did in Stay More and the Ozarks. Evening was the time before supper, night was the time after supper, but to say that Viridis and her father spent their nights together is misleading…somewhat.)
Days, when she had any time free from managing the household, from meeting with the tutors who came regularly to give private lessons in voice, piano, French, and Spanish to her and her sister, from planning the lunches for her brothers and their friends, from dusting the spots that Ruby had missed, from shopping in the markets