“No matter how hard you try, something’s always going wrong,” he said, but he couldn’t be down long. He was too dazzled by his new importance as a solid citizen, actually on the Chamber of Commerce, on the Church Entertainment Committee, and manager of the remodeled Retail Furniture Store and Undertaking Parlor. Whoever managed the furniture salesmen automatically became assistant undertaker, since the duties had always gone together like those of jeweller and optician. The simple facts of embalming, selecting a coffin, and directing the funeral procedure were passed on by his predecessor, and Papa was ecstatically pleased over his emergence as a professional man, respected by all, particularly on those sorrowful occasions when he tiptoed about in his new funeral black, wearing white gloves and whispering consolation to the bereaved. “A more cheerful personality than Fanzer has,” Mr. Carson himself said, referring to the undertaker in charge. These personal advantages in his career so intoxicated Papa that he was enraged to hear doubts expressed on the wisdom of his marriage. Mrs. Friend told him old friends of Daisy thought his new wife favored her own child at the expense of her acquired three. Papa vowed he would never forgive such an impudent comment. He swore that Lois had put the children up to mischief because she was jealous he had the Furness place. He forbade the girls to visit their aunt. But there seemed no way of keeping his children up to his own social level. On Sundays, when he and his stylish bride wheeled Minelda in her Sunday best down Main Boulevard, he was sure to meet his three daughters wandering glumly and shabbily down the street. Could they have money to go to the picture show or to the Kandy Kitchen? By George, he indignantly replied, he was not made of money. Let them go home and catch up on their homework, instead of running the streets.

“Can we have the key?” Lena impertinently asked. “How can we go home if we’re locked out?”

Mrs. Willard murmured to Papa that they wanted the key just to scratch up the piano and muss up the Sunday paper. She said they took such poor care of their clothes She personally was ashamed to have passersby see them on the front porch, so they had better keep in the back of the house. Papa almost hated them for their silent, gloomy faces, for their interfering with his just rewards, and for their unconscious reminder that his new affluence was not sound. There wasn’t any more money than there ever was, for the upkeep of his wife’s house took three times more than he had ever dreamed. And, as She herself said, you couldn’t expect her to spend the late Dr. Turner’s bequest and her own little savings on those three spoiled kids. There was an end to even her patience, She declared.

27

GRANDMA WAS BACK in London Junction “on her own, too,” as she jubilantly boasted, definitely not living with kin. After her Cleveland disasters which she blamed mysteriously on politics, she had been obliged to make a visiting tour of her children, a very disagreeable experience for a lady who had once branched out into a career.