CHAPTER II
Union Hill had been created by two very different classes of home-makers, a fact which was obvious from its aspect. Its undistinguished frame buildings for the most part sheltered families who, having to live somewhere, had settled there where inadequate communication with the rest of the world kept rents down. Side by side with this drab majority, but mingling with it little, a few well-to-do business men had built comfortable, roomy homes in an uninspired compromise between their business connections in the city and their preference for open-air life for their families. This narrow ridge of trap rock continuing the Palisades southward between the partly reclaimed backlots of Hoboken and the immense, irreclaimable salt marshes of the Hackensack Valley, had a certain picturesqueness, had seemed to promise freedom from malaria (supposed at that time to result from the breathing the "miasma" hanging low about swamp land), and certainly offered fresher air than a flat on a New York street or a town beside a New Jersey marsh. It was a one-sided sort of compromise in which the families came out rather badly. Whatever natural beauty might be inherent in the site was largely nullified by the tawdry imaginings of small architects and building contractors, and despite popular medical theories, the malaria was about the same on the hill as on the flats. But though the advance of the suburban idea was already developing more attractive sites at no very great distance, few families moved away. With the massive immobility characteristic of humanity, the scattered well-to-do families of Union Hill stuck it out, grim and disillusioned, taking the consequences of their error of judgment rather than lose the sensation of stability, which means home.
Little Neale was quite unconscious of all this. To his ten-year-old thoughts "the Hill" was home, and where could you live except at home? It never occurred to him that there might be other or better homes—the Hill was where he lived. He accepted it as uncritically as he accepted life, school, his parents. Being, for that region where every one took quinine as a matter of course, rather a healthy boy, he accepted the initial facts of nature without criticism or much interest, working off the surplus of his young energy in baseball, shinny and guerilla skirmishes with the boys from other localities.
His unconcern with the world around him, except for the details of boy-life, was complete. Home was warm and secure; he did not inquire whether other homes might be less warm or more elegant. Food was good to eat, though meals with adult conversation between his father and mother were tedious and occupied far too much time that might have been spent in play. His father was kind and remote. Neale thought very little about his father. He went away in the morning after breakfast and came in just before supper. He was in the lumber business, and when he went away, it was to the "office." Neale never went to the office; but once in a while, on Saturdays, Father took him walking down the long flight of wooden steps, down to the enemy's country where, thanks to the size of his father's protecting figure, never a Hoboken mick dared to throw a mudball; across the railroad track and a long, long way on paved sidewalks till they came out on a wide, noisy, muddy street filled with trucks drawn by horses with gleaming round haunches. And on the other side of the street there wasn't any more land, but long sheds that stuck out into the oily, green Hudson River. These sheds had huge doors through which the big, dappled horses kept hauling trucks, in and out. Some of the wharves had ships tied beside them. Occasionally these were sailing ships with bow-sprits slanting forward over the street, but more often steamers, black except for a band of red down near the water. As Neale walked along, although he never ventured to ask his busy father to stop, and let him stare his fill, he could catch glimpses through the doorways of what went on inside the sheds. There were steep gang-ways, sloping from the plank floor of the pier to the ships, and up and down these, big men in blue jumpers wheeled hand-carts, always moving at a dog-trot. Through other openings, bundles of boxes tied together with rope slid down sloping boards, and other men with sharp hooks were always loading them on trucks or unloading them from trucks; or huge bales descended from the air, dangling at the end of a clinking chain. This bustle and noise, the strange tarry smells and the clatter of steam winches exhilarated Neale, excited him, made something quiver and glow within him. He longed to go in and be part of it.
But Father never went inside, and it never occurred to Neale to explain how he felt, and to ask Father please to take him in. Silent as an Iroquois, he walked beside his father, who often glanced down, baffled, at the healthy, personable little boy beside him, looking so exactly like any other well-dressed, middle-class little boy.
And yet, often before he fell asleep at night, Neale heard again the clanking clatter of the great unloading cranes, smelled again the intoxicating tarry salty ocean smells and felt again something quiver and glow within him.
There was neither quiver nor glow about the place where Father finally stopped of his own accord. In a wide part of the street, huge piles of lumber were stacked. Father would walk slowly along these, looking at them very hard, and then he would go into a tiny, stuffy little wooden clap-boarded house—just one room, with men in shirt sleeves writing at desks—and there he would talk incomprehensible grown-up talk with one of the men, and the man would write at his desk, and Father standing up, would write in a note-book with a fountain pen . . . and that was all the fun there was to the lumber business!
Left to himself, Neale sat on the door-step and watched the fascinating life on the docks. Once he slipped across the street and tried to follow a truck in, but a big man with a red face yelled at him so loudly to "get out of there" that Neale ran back again, furiously angry but not knowing how to get around the big watchman. All he could do was to sit just inside the door, hating the watchman, and stare at the tantalizing activity so far away, and wish with all his heart that Father's business were more romantic.
Mother meant more to Neale than Father did. He knew her better ... a little better. He had even some abstract ideas about her, that she was beautiful when she dressed up to go out in the afternoon. Mother fussed about his clothes more than was convenient, and insisted on baths, and washing hands before meals, but when he was sick, Mother read him stories, and let him leave the gas turned on in his room when he went to bed. Mother gave him pennies, too, and when Father was away on a business trip, he and Mother would eat alone together, and she would talk to him and ask him questions about school and play, and his boy friends. Neale didn't mind telling her things ... he liked Mother ... but he couldn't seem to manage to think of a great deal to tell her. It sounded foolish to talk about games to grown-ups.
And games were really all that Neale cared about, almost all that he ever thought about. As to telling Mother other things, the few other things he did occasionally think about, why, there didn't seem to be anywhere to start. He'd have to begin "way back at the beginning" and now that Neale was ten years old, the beginning was too far back for him to lay hold of.
As a matter of fact, she did not often ask about any of it, even in her distant careful way of asking. She just took good care of him, and had what he liked for supper, and put the kind of books he liked up in his room, and kept his buttons sewed on, and every night, till he was a big, big boy came into his room to kiss him good-night in his bed. She didn't say anything much then; just, "Have you enough covers?" maybe; or, "I believe I'd better open that window wider," and then, with the kiss, "Good-night, Neale."
"Good-night, Mother."
Then he turned over and nearly always went instantly to sleep.
When Father was at home, mostly Father and Mother talked together at table, and read together after supper in the sitting-room, while Neale "did" his lessons upstairs. Or else Mother would dress up in one of her pretty dresses and Father would put on a clean shirt and his dark suit and they would go across the river to a theater in New York, leaving Neale to Katie, the good-natured, middle-aged Irish cook who had been with them since before Neale's birth. Or sometimes they had "company"; other ladies in pretty dresses and other husbands in clean shirts and dark suits. Then they had a specially good supper, the sort of expensive things that were usually reserved for Sunday dinner, planked shad and roast chicken and ice-cream, and coffee in the little gold-lined cups that Mother always washed herself. Neale didn't mind company since nobody paid much attention to him, and he liked the extra Sunday eatables on a week-day, but one of his few impressions about his father and mother was that, although they always talked and laughed a great deal more when there was company, and seemed to have a lively time, they really liked it better when there were only the two of them talking over Neale's head at the table, and settling down afterwards to read and talk to one another around the drop-light.
Another of those impressions was the tone of his father's voice when looking up from his book, he said, "Oh, Mary!" Neale always knew just the look there would be in Mother's eyes as she laid down her own book and asked, "Yes, what is it, dear?"