The Whole Family

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Title: The Whole Family, A Novel by Twelve Authors

Authors: William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton
Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jordan, John Kendrick Bangs,
Henry James, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wyatt, Mary Raymond Shipman
Andrews, Alice Brown, Henry Van Dyke

Language: English

Etext prepared by Dianne Bean, Prescott Valley, Arizona.

THE WHOLE FAMILY

CONTENTS

I. The Father by William Dean Howells
II. The Old-Maid Aunt by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
III. The Grandmother by Mary Heaton Vorse
IV. The Daughter-in-Law by Mary Stewart Cutting
V. The School-Girl by Elizabeth Jordan
VI. The Son-in-Law by John Kendrick Bangs
VII. The Married Son by Henry James
VIII.The Married Daughter by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
IX. The Mother by Edith Wyatt
X. The School-Boy by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
XI. Peggy by Alice Brown
XII. The Friend of the Family by Henry Van Dyke

THE WHOLE FAMILY

I. THE FATHER

by William Dean Howells

As soon as we heard the pleasant news--I suppose the news of an
engagement ought always to be called pleasant--it was decided that I
ought to speak first about it, and speak to the father. We had not been
a great while in the neighborhood, and it would look less like a bid
for the familiar acquaintance of people living on a larger scale than
ourselves, and less of an opening for our own intimacy if they turned
out to be not quite so desirable in other ways as they were in the
worldly way. For the ladies of the respective families first to offer
and receive congratulations would be very much more committing on both
sides; at the same time, to avoid the appearance of stiffness, some one
ought to speak, and speak promptly. The news had not come to us
directly from our neighbors, but authoritatively from a friend of
theirs, who was also a friend of ours, and we could not very well hold
back. So, in the cool of the early evening, when I had quite finished
rasping my lawn with the new mower, I left it at the end of the swath,
which had brought me near the fence, and said across it,

"Good-evening!"

My neighbor turned from making his man pour a pail of water on the
earth round a freshly planted tree, and said, "Oh, good-evening! How
d'ye do? Glad to see you!" and offered his hand over the low coping so
cordially that I felt warranted in holding it a moment.

"I hope it's in order for me to say how very much my wife and I are
interested in the news we've heard about one of your daughters? May I
offer our best wishes for her happiness?"

"Oh, thank you," my neighbor said. "You're very good indeed. Yes, it's
rather exciting--for us. I guess that's all for to-night, Al," he said,
in dismissal of his man, before turning to lay his arms comfortably on
the fence top. Then he laughed, before he added, to me, "And rather
surprising, too."

"Those things are always rather surprising, aren't they?" I suggested.

"Well, yes, I suppose they are. It oughtn't be so in our case, though,
as we've been through it twice before: once with my son--he oughtn't to
have counted, but he did--and once with my eldest daughter. Yes, you
might say you never do quite expect it, though everybody else does.
Then, in this case, she was the baby so long, that we always thought of
her as a little girl. Yes, she's kept on being the pet, I guess, and we
couldn't realize what was in the air."

I had thought, from the first sight of him, that there was something
very charming in my neighbor's looks. He had a large, round head, which
had once been red, but was now a russet silvered, and was not too large
for his manly frame, swaying amply outward, but not too amply, at the
girth. He had blue, kind eyes, and a face fully freckled, and the girl
he was speaking of with a tenderness in his tones rather than his
words, was a young feminine copy of him; only, her head was little,
under its load of red hair, and her figure, which we had lately noticed
flitting in and out, as with a shy consciousness of being stared at on
account of her engagement, was as light as his was heavy on its feet.

I said, "Naturally," and he seemed glad of the chance to laugh again.

"Well, of course! And her being away at school made it all the more so.
If we'd had her under our eye, here--Well, we shouldn't have had her
under our eye if she had BEEN here; or if we had, we shouldn't have
seen what was going on; at least _I_ shouldn't; maybe her mother would.
So it's just as well it happened as it did happen, I guess. We
shouldn't have been any the wiser if we'd known all about it." I joined
him in his laugh at his paradox, and he began again. "What's that about
being the unexpected that happens? I guess what happens is what ought
to have been expected. We might have known when we let her go to a
coeducational college that we were taking a risk of losing her; but we
lost our other daughter that way, and SHE never went to ANY kind of
college. I guess we counted the chances before we let her go. What's
the use? Of course we did, and I remember saying to my wife, who's more
anxious than I am about most things--women are, I guess--that if the
worst came to the worst, it might not be such a bad thing. I always
thought it wasn't such an objectionable feature, in the coeducational
system, if the young people did get acquainted under it, and maybe so
well acquainted that they didn't want to part enemies in the end. I
said to my wife that I didn't see how, if a girl was going to get
married, she could have a better basis than knowing the fellow through
three or four years' hard work together. When you think of the sort of
hit-or-miss affairs most marriages are that young people make after a
few parties and picnics, coeducation as a preliminary to domestic
happiness doesn't seem a bad notion."

"There's something in what you say," I assented.

"Of course there is," my neighbor insisted. "I couldn't help laughing,
though," and he laughed, as if to show how helpless he had been, "at
what my wife said. She said she guessed if it came to that they would
get to know more of each other's looks than they did of their minds.
She had me there, but I don't think my girl has made out so very poorly
even as far as books are concerned."

Upon this invitation to praise her, I ventured to say, "A young lady of
Miss Talbert's looks doesn't need much help from books."

I could see that what I had said pleased him to the core, though he put
on a frown of disclaimer in replying, "I don't know about her looks.
She's a GOOD girl, though, and that's the main thing, I guess."

"For her father, yes, but other people don't mind her being pretty," I
persisted. "My wife says when Miss Talbert comes out into the garden,
the other flowers have no chance."

"Good for Mrs. Temple!" my neighbor shouted, joyously giving himself
away.

I have always noticed that when you praise a girl's beauty to her
father, though he makes a point of turning it off in the direction of
her goodness, he likes so well to believe she is pretty that he cannot
hold out against any persistence in the admirer of her beauty. My
neighbor now said with the effect of tasting a peculiar sweetness in my
words, "I guess I shall have to tell my wife, that." Then he added,
with a rush of hospitality, "Won't you come in and tell her yourself?"

"Not now, thank you. It's about our tea-time."

"Glad it isn't your DINNER-time!" he said, heartily.

"Well, yes. We don't see the sense of dining late in a place like this.
The fact is, we're both village-bred, and we like the mid-day dinner.
We make rather a high tea, though."

"So do we. I always want a dish of something hot. My wife thinks cake
is light, but I think meat is."

"Well, cake is the New England superstition," I observed. "And I
suppose York State, too."

"Yes, more than pie is," he agreed. "For supper, anyway. You may have
pie at any or all of the three meals, but you have GOT to have cake at
tea, if you are anybody at all. In the place where my wife lived, a
woman's social standing was measured by the number of kinds of cake she
had."

We laughed at that, too, and then there came a little interval and I
said, "Your place is looking fine."

He turned his head and gave it a comprehensive stare. "Yes, it is," he
admitted. "They tell me it's an ugly old house, and I guess if my
girls, counting my daughter-in-law, had their way, they would have that
French roof off, and something Georgian--that's what they call it--on,
about as quick as the carpenter could do it. They want a kind of
classic front, with pillars and a pediment; or more the Mount Vernon
style, body yellow, with white trim. They call it Georgian after
Washington?" This was obviously a joke.

"No, I believe it was another George, or four others. But I don't
wonder you want to keep your house as it is. It expresses something
characteristic." I saved myself by forbearing to say it was handsome.
It was, in fact, a vast, gray-green wooden edifice, with a mansard-roof
cut up into many angles, tipped at the gables with rockets and finials,
and with a square tower in front, ending in a sort of lookout at the
top, with a fence of iron filigree round it. The taste of 1875 could
not go further; it must have cost a heap of money in the depreciated
paper of the day.

I suggested something of the kind to my neighbor, and he laughed. "I
guess it cost all we had at the time. We had been saving along up, and
in those days it used to be thought that the best investment you could
make was to put your money in a house of your own. That's what we did,
anyway. I had just got to be superintendent of the Works, and I don't
say but what we felt my position a little. Well, we felt it more than
we did when I got to be owner." He laughed in good-humored self-satire.
"My wife used to say we wanted a large house so as to have it big
enough to hold me, when I was feeling my best, and we built the largest
we could for all the money we had. She had a plan of her own, which she
took partly from the house of a girl friend of hers where she had been
visiting, and we got a builder to carry out her idea. We did have some
talk about an architect, but the builder said he didn't want any
architect bothering around HIM, and I don't know as SHE did, either.
Her idea was plenty of chambers and plenty of room in them, and two big
parlors one side of the front door, and a library and dining-room on
the other; kitchen in the L part, and girl's room over that; wide front
hall, and black-walnut finish all through the first floor. It was
considered the best house at the time in Eastridge, and I guess it was.
But now, I don't say but what it's old-fashioned. I have to own up to
that with the girls, but I tell them so are we, and that seems to make
it all right for a while. I guess we sha'n't change."

He continued to stare at the simple-hearted edifice, so simple-hearted
in its out-dated pretentiousness, and then he turned and leaned over
the top of the fence where he had left his arms lying, while
contemplating the early monument of his success. In making my
journalistic study, more or less involuntary, of Eastridge, I had put
him down as materially the first man of the place; I might have gone
farther and put him down as the first man intellectually. We folk who
have to do more constantly with reading and writing are apt to think
that the other folk who have more to do with making and marketing have
not so much mind, but I fancy we make a mistake in that now and then.
It is only another kind of mind which they have quite as much of as we
have of ours. It was intellectual force that built up the Plated-Ware
Works of Eastridge, where there was no other reason for their being,
and it was mental grip that held constantly to the management, and
finally grasped the ownership. Nobody ever said that Talbert had come
unfairly into that, or that he had misused his money in buying men
after he began to come into it in quantity. He was felt in a great many
ways, though he made something of a point of not being prominent in
politics, after being president of the village two terms. The minister
of his church was certainly such a preacher as he liked; and nothing
was done in the church society without him; he gave the town a library
building, and a soldier's monument; he was foremost in getting the
water brought in, which was natural enough since he needed it the most;
he took a great interest in school matters, and had a fight to keep
himself off the board of education; he went into his pocket for village
improvements whenever he was asked, and he was the chief contributor to
the public fountain under the big elm. If he carefully, or even
jealously guarded his own interests, and held the leading law firm in
the hollow of his hand, he was not oppressive, to the general
knowledge. He was a despot, perhaps, but he was Blackstone's ideal of
the head of a state, a good despot. In all his family relations he was
of the exemplary perfection which most other men attain only on their
tombstones, and I had found him the best of neighbors. There were some
shadows of diffidence between the ladies of our families, mainly on the
part of my wife, but none between Talbert and me. He showed me, as a
newspaper man with ideals if not abilities rather above the average, a
deference which pleased my wife, even more than me.

It was the married daughter whom she most feared might, if occasion
offered, give herself more consequence than her due. She had tried to
rule her own family while in her father's house, and now though she had
a house of her own, my wife believed that she had not wholly
relinquished her dominion there. Her husband was the junior member of
the law firm which Talbert kept in his pay, to the exclusion of most
other clients, and he was a very good fellow, so far as I knew, with
the modern conception of his profession which, in our smaller towns and
cities, has resulted in corporation lawyers and criminal lawyers, and
has left to a few aging attorneys the faded traditions and the scanty
affairs of the profession. My wife does not mind his standing somewhat
in awe of his father-in-law, but she thinks poorly of his spirit in
relation to that managing girl he has married. Talbert's son is in the
business with him, and will probably succeed him in it; but it is well
known in the place that he will never be the man his father is, not
merely on account of his college education, but also on account of the
easy temperament, which if he had indulged it to the full would have
left him no better than some kind of artist. As it is, he seems to
leave all the push to his father; he still does some sketching outside,
and putters over the aesthetic details in the business, the new designs
for the plated ware, and the illustrated catalogues which the house
publishes every year; I am in hopes that we shall get the printing,
after we have got the facilities. It would be all right with the young
man in the opinion of his censors if he had married a different kind of
woman, but young Mrs. Talbert is popularly held just such another as
her husband, and easy-going to the last degree. She was two or three
years at the Art Students' League, and it was there that her husband
met her before they both decided to give up painting and get married.

The two youngest children, or the fall chickens as they are called in
recognition of the wide interval between their ages and those of the
other children, are probably of the indeterminate character proper to
their years. We think the girl rather inclines to a hauteur based upon
the general neglect of that quality in the family, where even the
eldest sister is too much engaged in ruling to have much force left for
snubbing. The child carries herself with a vague loftiness, which has
apparently not awaited the moment of long skirts for keeping pretenders
to her favor at a distance. In the default of other impertinents to
keep in abeyance we fancy that she exercises her gift upon her younger
brother, who, so far as we have been able to note, is of a disposition
which would be entirely sweet if it were not for the exasperations he
suffers from her. I like to put myself in his place, and to hold that
he believes himself a better judge than she of the sort of companions
he chooses, she being disabled by the mental constitution of her sex,
and the defects of a girl's training, from knowing the rare quality of
boys who present themselves even to my friendly eyes as dirty, and,
when not patched, ragged. I please myself in my guesses at her
character with the conjecture that she is not satisfied with her
sister's engagement to a fellow-student in a co-educational college,
who is looking forward to a professorship.

In spite of her injustice in regard to his own companions, this
imaginable attitude of hers impresses the boy, if I understand boys. I
have no doubt he reasons that she must be right about something, and as
she is never right about boys, she must be right about brothers-in-law,
potential if not actual. This one may be, for all the boy knows, a
sissy; he inclines to believe, from what he understands of the matter,
that he is indeed a sissy, or he would never have gone to a college
where half the students are girls. He himself, as I have heard, intends
to go to a college, but whether Harvard, or Bryant's Business College,
he has not yet decided. One thing he does know, though, and that is
there are not going to be any girls in it. We have not allowed our
invention so great play in regard to the elder members of our
neighbor's family perhaps because we really know something more about
them. Mrs. Talbert duly called after We came to Eastridge, and when my
wife had self-respectfully waited a proper time, which she made a
little more than a week lest she should feel that she had been too
eager for the acquaintance, she returned the call. Then she met not
only Mrs. Talbert, but Mrs. Talbert's mother, who lives with them, in
an anxiety for their health which would impair her own if she were not
of a constitution such as you do not find in these days of unladylike
athletics. She was inclined to be rather strict with my wife about her
own health, and mine too, and told her she must be careful not to let
me work too hard, or overeat, or leave off my flannels before the
weather was settled in the spring. She said she had heard that I had
left a very good position on a Buffalo paper when I bought the
Eastridge Banner, and that the town ought to feel very much honored. My
wife suppressed her conviction that this was the correct view of the
case, in a deprecatory expression of our happiness in finding ourselves
in Eastridge, and our entire satisfaction with our prospects and
surroundings. Then Mrs. Talbert's mother inquired, as delicately as
possible, what denominations, religious and medical, we were of, how
many children we had, and whether mostly boys or girls, and where and
how long we had been married. She was glad, she said, that we had taken
the place next them, after our brief sojourn in the furnished house
where we had first lived, and said that there was only one objection to
the locality, which was the prevalence of moths; they obliged you to
put away your things in naphtha-balls almost the moment the spring
opened. She wished to know what books my wife was presently reading,
and whether she approved of women's clubs to the extent that they were
carried to in some places. She believed in book clubs, but to her mind
it was very questionable whether the time that ladies gave to writing
papers on so many different subjects was well spent. She thought it a
pity that so many things were canned, nowadays, and so well canned that
the old arts of pickling and preserving were almost entirely lost. In
the conversation, where she bore a leading part as long as she remained
in the room, her mind took a wide range, and visited more human
interests than my wife was at first able to mention, though afterward
she remembered so many that I formed the notion of something
encyclopedic in its compass. When she reached the letter Z, she rose
and took leave of my wife, saying that now she must go and lie down, as
it appeared to be her invariable custom to do (in behalf of the robust
health which she had inherited unimpaired from a New England ancestry),
at exactly half-past four every afternoon. It was this, she said, more
than any one thing that enabled her to go through so much as she did;
but through the door which she left open behind her my wife heard
Talbert's voice saying, in mixed mockery and tenderness, "Don't forget
your tonic, mother," and hers saying, "No, I won't, Cyrus. I never
forget it, and it's a great pity you don't take it, too."

It was our conclusion from all the facts of this call, when we came to
discuss them in the light of some friendly gossip which we had
previously heard, that the eldest daughter of the Talberts came
honestly by her love of ruling if she got it from her grandmother, but
that she was able to indulge it oftener, and yet not so often as might
have been supposed from the mild reticence of her mother. Older if not
shrewder observers than ourselves declared that what went in that house
was what Mrs. Talbert said, and that it went all the more effectively
because what she said Talbert said too.

That might have been because she said so little. When her mother left
the room she let a silence follow in which she seemed too embarrassed
to speak for a while on finding herself alone with my wife, and my wife
decided that the shyness of the girl whose engagement was soon
afterward reported, as well as the easy-goingness of the eldest son,
had come from their mother. As soon as Mrs. Talbert could command
herself, she began to talk, and every word she said was full of sense,
with a little gust of humor in the sense which was perfectly charming.
Absolutely unworldly as she was, she had very good manners; in her
evasive way she was certainly qualified to be the leader of society in
Eastridge, and socially Eastridge thought fairly well of itself. She
did not obviously pretend to so much literature as her mother, but she
showed an even nicer intelligence of our own situation in Eastridge.
She spoke with a quiet appreciation of the improvement in the Banner,
which, although she quoted Mr. Talbert, seemed to be the result of her
personal acquaintance with the paper in the past as well as the
present. My wife pronounced her the ideal mother of a family, and just
what the wife of such a man as Cyrus Talbert ought to be, but no doubt
because Mrs. Talbert's characteristics were not so salient as her
mother's, my wife was less definitely descriptive of her.

From time to time, it seemed that there was a sister of Mr. Talbert's
who visited in the family, but was now away on one of the many other
visits in which she passed her life. She was always going or coming
somewhere, but at the moment she was gone. My wife inferred from the
generation to which her brother belonged that she had long been a lady
of that age when ladies begin to be spoken of as maiden. Mrs. Talbert
spoke of her as if they were better friends than sisters-in-law are apt
to be, and said that she was to be with them soon, and she would bring
her with her when she returned my wife's call. From the general
impression in Eastridge we gathered that Miss Talbert was not without
the disappointment which endears maiden ladies to the imagination, but
the disappointment was of a date so remote that it was only matter of
pathetic hearsay, now. Miss Talbert, in her much going and coming, had
not failed of being several times in Europe. She especially affected
Florence, where she was believed to have studied the Tuscan School to
unusual purpose, though this was not apparent in any work of her own.
We formed the notion that she might be uncomfortably cultured, but when
she came to call with Mrs. Talbert afterward, my wife reported that you
would not have thought, except for a remark she dropped now and then,
that she had ever been out of her central New York village, and so far
from putting on airs of art, she did not speak of any gallery abroad,
or of the pensions in which she stayed in Florence, or the hotels in
other cities of Italy where she had stopped to visit the local schools
of painting.

In this somewhat protracted excursion I have not forgotten that I left
Mr. Talbert leaning against our party fence, with his arms resting on
the top, after a keen if not critical survey of his dwelling. He did
not take up our talk at just the point where we had been in it, but
after a reflective moment, he said, "I don't remember just whether Mrs.
Temple told my mother-in-law you were homoeopaths or allopaths."

"Well," I said, "that depends. I rather think we are homoeopaths of a
low-potency type." My neighbor's face confessed a certain
disappointment. "But we are not bigoted, even in the article of
appreciable doses. Our own family doctor in our old place always
advised us, in stress of absence from him, to get the best doctor
wherever we happened to be, so far as we could make him out, and not
mind what school he was of. I suppose we have been treated by as many
allopaths as homoeopaths, but we're rather a healthy family, and put it
all together we have not been treated a great deal by either."

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