I
THOUGH he saw them twice daily, though he knew and
amply discussed every detail of their expenditures, yet for
weeks together Babbitt was no more conscious of his children
than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves.
The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of
Verona.
She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the Gruensberg
Leather Company; she did her work with the thoroughness
of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands
them; but she was one of the people who give an agitating
impression of being on the point of doing something
desperate—of leaving a job or a husband—without ever doing
it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott's hesitant ardors that
he became the playful parent. When he returned from the
Elks he peered coyly into the living-room and gurgled, "Has
our Kenny been here to-night?'' He never credited Verona's
protest, "Why, Ken and I are just good friends, and we only
talk about Ideas. I won't have all this sentimental nonsense,
that would spoil everything.''
It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.
With conditions in Latin and English but with a triumphant
record in manual training, basket-ball, and the organization
of dances, Ted was struggling through his Senior year in the
East Side High School. At home he was interested only when
he was asked to trace some subtle ill in the ignition system of
the car. He repeated to his tut-tutting father that he did not
wish to go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally
disturbed by this "shiftlessness'' and by Ted's relations with
Eunice Littlefield, next door.
Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield, that
wrought-iron fact-mill, that horse-faced priest of private ownership,
Eunice was a midge in the sun. She danced into the
house, she flung herself into Babbitt's lap when he was reading,
she crumpled his paper, and laughed at him when he
adequately explained that he hated a crumpled newspaper as
he hated a broken sales-contract. She was seventeen now.
Her ambition was to be a cinema actress. She did not merely
attend the showing of every "feature film;'' she also read the
motion-picture magazines, those extraordinary symptoms of
the Age of Pep-monthlies and weeklies gorgeously illustrated
with portraits of young women who had recently been manicure
girls, not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless
their every grimace had been arranged by a director, could
not have acted in the Easter cantata of the Central Methodist
Church; magazines reporting, quite seriously, in "interviews''
plastered with pictures of riding-breeches and California bungalows,
the views on sculpture and international politics of
blankly beautiful, suspiciously beautiful young men; outlining
the plots of films about pure prostitutes and kind-hearted
train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks
into Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.
These authorities Eunice studied. She could, she frequently
did, tell whether it was in November or December, 1905, that
Mack Harker? the renowned screen cowpuncher and badman,
began his public career. as chorus man in "Oh, You Naughty
Girlie.'' On the wall of her room, her father reported, she
had pinned up twenty-one photographs of actors. But the
signed portrait of the most graceful of the movie heroes she
carried in her young bosom.
Babbitt was bewildered by this worship of new gods, and
he suspected that Eunice smoked cigarettes. He smelled the
cloying reek from up-stairs, and heard her giggling with Ted.
He never inquired. The agreeable child dismayed him. Her
thin and charming face was sharpened by bobbed hair; her
skirts were short, her stockings were rolled, and, as she flew
after Ted, above the caressing silk were glimpses of soft
knees which made Babbitt uneasy, and wretched that she
should consider him old. Sometimes, in the veiled life of his
dreams, when the fairy child came running to him she took on
the semblance of Eunice Littlefield.
Ted was motor-mad as Eunice was movie-mad.
A thousand sarcastic refusals did not check his teasing for
a car of his own. However lax he might be about early rising
and the prosody of Vergil, he was tireless in tinkering. With
three other boys he bought a rheumatic Ford chassis, built an
amazing racer-body out of tin and pine, went skidding round
corners in the perilous craft, and sold it at a profit. Babbitt
gave him a motor-cycle, and every Saturday afternoon, with
seven sandwiches and a bottle of Coca-Cola in his pockets,
and Eunice perched eerily on the rumble seat, he went roaring
off to distant towns.
Usually Eunice and he were merely neighborhood chums,
and quarreled with a wholesome and violent lack of delicacy;
but now and then, after the color and scent of a dance, they
were silent together and a little furtive, and Babbitt was
worried.
Babbitt was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying,
opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most
parents, he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was
clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing. He justified himself
by croaking, "Well, Ted's mother spoils him. Got to be somebody
who tells him what's what, and me, I'm elected the goat.
Because I try to bring him up to be a real, decent, human being
and not one of these sapheads and lounge-lizards, of course
they all call me a grouch!''
Throughout, with the eternal human genius for arriving by
the worst possible routes at surprisingly tolerable goals, Babbitt
loved his son and warmed to his companionship and would
have sacrificed everything for him—if he could have been sure
of proper credit.
