The Family Album/The Tragic Conclusion of Cousin Alex's Go-Hither Attitude on the Discomforts of Home

by Arthur Baer

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THE TRAGIC CONCLUSION OF COUSIN
ALEX’S GO-HITHER ATTITUDE ON
THE DISCOMFORTS OF HOME

YES, that’s Cousin Alex in his sample clothes. Alex was a very neat dresser and he was always lookin in the fashion magazines to see what our well-dressed men were going to drink this Summer.

He was a traveling man for a big Danbury firm and only came home to sober up. He lived in hotels and Pullman trains so much that he often longed to get married and settle down.

But when anybody started to talk about the comforts of home, he would immediately pull he bachelor ideas up around his ears and get mad.

He’d say that all the comforts of home propaganda was pro-alimony literature gotten up by the lawyers and their confederates.

He said he never got a good cup of coffee at home in his life and everything was so burned they ought to use a fire alarm for a dinner gong.

It used to be mutton on Monday, veal on Tuesday and all those et cetera things, and you had about as much choice as coal on the chute. Talk about forcible feedings, home cooking was force without any feed.

But in a hotel a man can look at the bill-of-menu and he could order what he wanted and the waiter didn’t want to be kissed and the manager of the hotel wouldn’t bust into tears if he threw a plate at the cashier and missed. He said it was easier to dine with gentlemen than like one.

Hotel owners never asked guests to get up early in the morning and make the furnace fire, and so far as mending clothes was concerned, he said he never knew what real comfort was until he had lost all the buttons off his red flannel underwear.

They’d put enough starch in the cuffs to support a broken leg and if the neckband was any tougher they could chip diamonds with it. And anybody who wore a home-laundered collar did so with suicidal intent.

If you wanted your trousers mended your wife would slash a piece to match it out of your coat. Then she would have to chop up your vest to fix the coat and by the time they got through matching patches you looked like you were made up to play a busted soda in the church cantata.

Hotel tailors overcharge you, all right, but they do things quick and they get their mistakes back on time.

And it’s more fun fighting with stranger than with relatives, because once in a while the cops think you are right. And if you want to sleep late there ain't nobody to hammer of the door and ask if you're awake, and no kids playing leapfrog on the chandeliers. When a man is feeling sick in a hotel he don't have to ask any questions and that angel's ministering hand on the fevered brow might be all right in poems, but cracked ice was a darned fine imitation, and don't pull any of that Thomas Edison questionnaire business.

Alex wasn't exactly against family institutions, but when a man is away from home for so long he forgets the language. He used to say that home comforts and privacy were legends handed down from the time when folks lived in jungles, and that life in hotels and upper berths proved the Darwinian theory enough to please him.

He lived in upper berths so much that any time he came home he used to go up on the roof and

He used to go up to the roof and dress on the chimney

dress on the chimney. Once he went down to Coney Island and got on the merry-go-round and left his shoes with the ticket taker. When he called any of our neighbors he would leave his shoes in their vestibule, and he got mad if they weren't shined when he said good-bye to come home.

His habits were so single that it surprised everybody when he got married to a widow with four children. That's her on this page with those seven little boys and girls. All hers. You know you've got to marry a widow to find out just how many children she really has got, because all widows seem to think that children should be subtracted and not seen.

When Alex discovered that he had married one of those University Extension families, he got mad and claimed the widow had mobbed him instead of married him. All the kids went on their honeymoon with Alex and his new bride, who was new to him.

This was the first time that Alex had ever taken out a road show that was so big you needed an advance agent. When he got to towns he seemed surprised that there wasn't any billing up on the fences.

When you talk to him about home comforts, he don't say anything, but his eyes look like his ears are glad that he is still a traveling salesman.