Mr. Petersen saw Minnie once again. He and Frances did go to California to live, because they naturally couldn’t endure the mocking house in the suburbs, or the dreadful one in Brownsville Landing.
They did well enough; they were both able to make money and to save it; they were kind, industrious, charitable, very much respected. They never quarrelled, and never grew any more intimate or affectionate. A drab sort of life, and they knew it.
It was a good thing that Mr. Petersen was both thrifty and well-to-do, for Minnie’s demands on him were constant and outrageous. Her old obsession broke out again; she wrote asking for capital to start a boarding-house. The allowance he sent her didn’t suffice; she wanted, so she said, to become independent.
And did, in a most original way. All the money she took in from her boarders she regarded as profit, and belonging to her, while the bills, when they grew too pressing, were sent to Mr. Petersen with complicated and aggrieved letters complaining of the troubles of a landlady. Her independence was a heavy drain on him.
He asked Frances if she minded his going East to see her and the children once more.
“It’s ten years,” he said. “Robert’ll be quite a boy now.”
“Of course I don’t mind,” she answered, “I’d half like to see them myself; especially Minnie. I’m curious.”
Her boarding-house, so familiar to him financially, for which he was endlessly buying saucepans and tablecloths and towels, was a dingy old place in the west Twenties. Even from the outside it had the Minnie touch, bedraggled lace curtains and crooked shades.
He rang the bell, and waited with a fast beating heart. To see Minnie again, after all this time!
The door was opened reluctantly by a young girl. (Everything in that house was done reluctantly).
“Mrs. Naylor? I’ll see.... Is it about rooms?”
Surely that voice, that accent ...? He stared at her insistently in the darkness of the hall.
“Why!” he cried, “Isn’t it Sandra? Come into the light, my dear. Do you remember Uncle Chris?”
“I’ve heard Mother speak of you,” she answered listlessly, and turned up the gas.
“Oh, Sandra!” he cried again. “My dear ...! You’re—you don’t look very well!”
“I’m all right,” she replied, in languid surprise. “I’ve always been thin.”
“Thin!” he thought. “My child, you’re dying!”
But he said only that she was growing too fast, and smiled and patted her head.
He waited in the dark hall while she went to fetch her mother, and he was haunted by her awful and heart-breaking loveliness—the unmistakable shadow on her face.
She came back to lead him down into the basement. He noticed that there were holes in her stockings and that her dress was very shabby.
In the basement dining-room he found Minnie, and was welcomed without much cordiality. And if Sandra had shocked him in one way, Minnie shocked him in another. She was so much changed; so much older, she had quite a middle-aged look, she was much stouter, she was—he couldn’t deny it—she was almost common, with her bright eyes and her sharp nose and her double chin. And as badly dressed as ever, perhaps a little more spotty. Her old air of anxiety had left her, it was now no more than a shadow, a comfortable way of sighing at life in general. She was happier than she had ever been before. Her health was excellent, she was free to do as she pleased, and she was much admired. She had had more than one offer of marriage from boarders who respected the fortitude, the maternal affection and the business ability of this remarkable woman. But she had no further use for men.
“I’ve seen enough of them!” she would say. It was evident that she had suffered bitterly at their hands.
Her air towards Mr. Petersen implied that she was magnanimously willing to let bygones be bygones. They talked of the boarders; they were, for the most part, satisfactory, she said. The usual troubles, which one must expect in this life, above all if one were a woman alone in the world, and honest.
He spoke of Sandra. Minnie admitted that she was not strong, but that in her circumstances, she couldn’t do much for her.
“Send her out to us,” he urged. “The climate would be just the thing for her.”
“No, thanks!” Minnie answered, with irony, indicating her opinion of the tone of Mr. Petersen’s household.
He offered to pay for any course of treatment, for sending her away. But Minnie said, sharply, that it wasn’t necessary; she would outgrow her weakness; there wasn’t any reason for making such a fuss about it. He saw with amazement that this child whom she had formerly idolised was now the object of an unmistakable resentment which he could not comprehend. He wouldn’t have believed that it was jealousy; that as the child became a woman she became, to the instinctive female within Minnie, a rival. She was always trying to turn the talk away from Sandra to Robert. He was clever, he was obedient, he was, she said, altogether a comfort to her.
At last he came in from school, and Mr. Petersen ever afterward regretted his visit. If he could only have kept the memory of his stalwart tiny son, with his clear blue eyes and his gleeful smile!
This Robert was a pale, heavy boy of eleven or twelve, lazy, complacent, maddeningly adult in manner. He sat down with the conscious intention of entertaining this visitor, told him things he had read in the papers. It was evident he did not know he was speaking to his father. Mr. Petersen gave him some money, and in his heart completely disowned him.
Then he looked once more at her, a long, long look.
“Good-bye, Minnie!” he said.