HOTEL BARSTOW
245
of the third-class deck, he had told her how he would have a great
shoe business in the United States, selling only shoes made by hand
and of the be.st leather money could buy. Why, he had declared he
would have ten workmen under him! He would have commissions
from the millionaires of New York City and Washington and Bos–
ton!
But see how it was instead: after ten years he was a nothing, a
nobody. He
repaired
boots for the poor fishermen; he did not make
them for the millionaires. He had not made a single pair for anyont=
but her, himself, and me.
My father, his pride lacerated, his shame festering would, at this
point, retaliate. He would call on God as witness to his wife's failure
to observe the laws of marriage: she did not honor him nor love him
nor obey, but had made for herself a stifling little box of a life where
she did nothing but slothfully brood and cry because she had no yel–
low dress. What man on earth would
want
to work for a creature
like that?
I remember one of these quarrels especially well, not because it
was different from any of the others, but because of what followed it
on the next day. It was in September, the week before the Hotel Bar–
stow was to close for the season, and I was awake, sorrowing that
Miss Pride would soon go back to Boston and that all winter long I
would have nothing to do but go to school. My father had gone off
to the coast-guard house where he often spent the summer evenings,
playing checkers and drinking home-brew with the men off duty. I
was always glad when he went, for usually it meant that my mother
would be asleep by the time he came in. But tonight she was restless
and several times she spoke to me, "I can't sleep. Sonia, are you
awake, darling?" I did not answer and I heard her tum over, sigh,
and murmur to herself, "Too hot." It was always either too hot or
too cold for her, and not even in the spring or the autumn would
she admit that the temperature was pleasant. She would present her
perspiring face to my father, or, in December, would hold out her
blue hands and say, "You want to kill me !"
For some time I had been living with Miss Pride, first in her room
at the Hotel and then in her unknown Boston house and I was either
half-asleep or else so preoccupied with my thoughts that I did not
hear my father come in and it was only when I heard my mother
whisper, "I hate you! Christ God, I hate you!" that I realized he
had got into bed and that the close room was full of his breath.
"Let me alone," said my father. "I'm drunk."
But my mother repeated her malediction over and over as if
