PAGE 4
Her Boss
by
Harold, the only son, was a playwright–as yet “unproduced”–and he had a studio in Washington Square.
A half-hour later, Wanning was alone in his library. He would not permit himself to feel aggrieved. What was more commendable than a mother’s interest in her children’s pleasures? Moreover, it was his wife’s way of following things up, of never letting die grass grow under her feet, that had helped to push him along in the world. She was more ambitious than he,–that had been good for him. He was naturally indolent, and Julia’s childlike desire to possess material objects, to buy what other people were buying, had been the spur that made him go after business. It had, moreover, made his house the attractive place he believed it to be.
“Suppose,” his wife sometimes said to him when the bills came in from Celeste or Mme. Blanche, “suppose you had homely daughters; how would you like that?”
He wouldn’t have liked it. When he went anywhere with his three ladies, Wanning always felt very well done by. He had no complaint to make about them, or about anything. That was why it seemed so unreasonable–He felt along his back incredulously with his hand. Harold, of course, was a trial; but among all his business friends, he knew scarcely one who had a promising boy.
The house was so still that Wanning could hear a faint, metallic tinkle from the butler’s pantry. Old Sam was washing up the silver, which he put away himself every night.
Wanning rose and walked aimlessly down the hall and out through the dining-room.
“Any Apollinaris on ice, Sam? I’m not feeling very well tonight.”
The old colored man dried his hands.
“Yessah, Mistah Wanning. Have a little rye with it, sah?”
“No, thank you, Sam. That’s one of the things I can’t do any more. I’ve been to see a big doctor in the city, and he tells me there’s something seriously wrong with me. My kidneys have sort of gone back on me.”
It was a satisfaction to Wanning to name the organ that had betrayed him, while all the rest of him was so sound.
Sam was immediately interested. He shook his grizzled head and looked full of wisdom.
“Don’t seem like a gen’leman of such a temperate life ought to have anything wrong thar, sah.”
“No, it doesn’t, does it?”
Wanning leaned against the china closet and talked to Sam for nearly half an hour. The specialist who condemned him hadn’t seemed half so much interested. There was not a detail about the examination and the laboratory tests in which Sam did not show the deepest concern. He kept asking Wanning if he could remember “straining himself” when he was a young man.
“I’ve knowed a strain like that to sleep in a man for yeahs and yeahs, and then come back on him, ‘deed I have,” he said, mysteriously. “An’ again, it might be you got a floatin’ kidney, sah. Aftah dey once teah loose, dey sometimes don’t make no trouble for quite a while.”
When Wanning went to his room he did not go to bed. He sat up until he heard the voices of his wife and daughters in the hall below. His own bed somehow frightened him. In all the years he had lived in this house he had never before looked about his room, at that bed, with the thought that he might one day be trapped there, and might not get out again. He had been ill, of course, but his room had seemed a particularly pleasant place for a sick man; sunlight, flowers,–agreeable, well-dressed women coming in and out.
Now there was something sinister about the bed itself, about its position, and its relation to the rest of the furniture.
II
The next morning, on his way downtown, Wanning got off the subway train at Astor Place and walked over to Washington Square. He climbed three flights of stairs and knocked at his son’s studio. Harold, dressed, with his stick and gloves in his hand, opened the door. He was just going over to the Brevoort for breakfast. He greeted his father with the cordial familiarity practised by all the “boys” of his set, clapped him on the shoulder and said in his light, tonsilitis voice: