Tales of Men and Ghosts

AFTER his wife’s death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling out his business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to Brooklyn.

For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had never dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits.  Mr. Grew himself was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up, prospered, and become what the local press described as “prominent.”  He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row of houses across the street, the “trolley” wires forming a kind of aerial pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the steeple of the church which he and his wife had always attended, and where their only child had been baptized.

It was hard to snap all these threads of association, visual and sentimental; yet still harder, now that he was alone, to live so far from his boy.  Ronald Grew was practising law in New York, and there was no more chance of returning to live at Wingfield than of a river’s flowing inland from the sea.  Therefore to be near him his father must move; and it was characteristic of Mr. Grew, and of the situation generally, that the translation, when it took place, was to Brooklyn, and not to New York.

“Why you bury yourself in that hole I can’t think,” had been Ronald’s comment; and Mr. Grew simply replied that rents were lower in Brooklyn, and that he had heard of a house that would suit him.  In reality he had said to himself—­being the only recipient of his own confidences—­that if he went to New York he might be on the boy’s mind; whereas, if he lived in Brooklyn, Ronald would always have a good excuse for not popping over to see him every other day.  The sociological isolation of Brooklyn, combined with its geographical nearness, presented in fact the precise conditions for Mr. Grew’s case.  He wanted to be near enough to New York to go there often, to feel under his feet the same pavement that Ronald trod, to sit now and then in the same theatres, and find on his breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency, inserted Ronald’s name in the sacred bounds of the society column.  It had always been a trial to Mr. Grew to have to wait twenty-four hours to read that “among those present was Mr. Ronald Grew.”  Now he had it with his coffee, and left it on the breakfast-table to the perusal of a “hired girl” cosmopolitan enough to do it justice.  In such ways Brooklyn attested the advantages of its propinquity to New York, while remaining, as regards Ronald’s duty to his father, as remote and inaccessible as Wingfield.

It was not that Ronald shirked his filial obligations, but rather because of his heavy sense of them, that Mr. Grew so persistently sought to minimize and lighten them.  It was he who insisted, to Ronald, on the immense difficulty of getting from New York to Brooklyn.

“Any way you look at it, it makes a big hole in the day; and there’s not much use in the ragged rim left.  You say you’re dining out next Sunday?  Then I forbid you to come over here for lunch.  Do you understand me, sir?  You disobey at the risk of your father’s malediction!  Where did you say you were dining?  With the Waltham Bankshires again?  Why, that’s the second time in three weeks, ain’t it?  Big blow-out, I suppose?  Gold plate and orchids—­opera singers in afterward?  Well, you’d be in a nice box if there was a fog on the river, and you got hung up half-way over.  That’d be a handsome return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire has shown you—­singling out a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks! (What’s the daughter’s name—­Daisy?) No, sir—­don’t you come fooling round here next Sunday, or I’ll set the dogs on you.  And you wouldn’t find me in anyhow, come to think of it.  I’m lunching out myself, as it happens—­yes sir, lunching out.  Is there anything especially comic in my lunching out?  I don’t often do it, you say?  Well, that’s no reason why I never should.  Who with?  Why, with—­with old Dr. Bleaker:  Dr. Eliphalet Bleaker.  No, you wouldn’t know about him—­he’s only an old friend of your mother’s and mine.”

Gradually Ronald’s insistence became less difficult to overcome.  With his customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began to “take the hint,” to give in to “the old gentleman’s” growing desire for solitude.

“I’m set in my ways, Ronny, that’s about the size of it; I like to go tick-ticking along like a clock.  I always did.  And when you come bouncing in I never feel sure there’s enough for dinner—­or that I haven’t sent Maria out for the evening.  And I don’t want the neighbors to see me opening my own door to my son.  That’s the kind of cringing snob I am.  Don’t give me away, will you?  I want ’em to think I keep four or five powdered flunkeys in the hall day and night—­same as the lobby of one of those Fifth Avenue hotels.  And if you pop over when you’re not expected, how am I going to keep up the bluff?”

Ronald yielded after the proper amount of resistance—­his intuitive sense, in every social transaction, of the proper amount of force to be expended, was one of the qualities his father most admired in him.  Mr. Grew’s perceptions in this line were probably more acute than his son suspected.  The souls of short thick-set men, with chubby features, mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering between folds of fat like almond kernels in half-split shells—­souls thus encased do not reveal themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate emotional instruments.  But in spite of the dense disguise in which he walked Mr. Grew vibrated exquisitely in response to every imaginative appeal; and his son Ronald was perpetually stimulating and feeding his imagination.

Ronald in fact constituted his father’s one escape from the impenetrable element of mediocrity which had always hemmed him in.  To a man so enamoured of beauty, and so little qualified to add to its sum total, it was a wonderful privilege to have bestowed on the world such a being.  Ronald’s resemblance to Mr. Grew’s early conception of what he himself would have liked to look might have put new life into the discredited theory of pre-natal influences.  At any rate, if the young man owed his beauty, his distinction and his winning manner to the dreams of one of his parents, it was certainly to those of Mr. Grew, who, while outwardly devoting his life to the manufacture and dissemination of Grew’s Secure Suspender Buckle, moved in an enchanted inward world peopled with all the figures of romance.  In this high company Mr. Grew cut as brilliant a figure as any of its noble phantoms; and to see his vision of himself suddenly projected on the outer world in the shape of a brilliant popular conquering son, seemed, in retrospect, to give to that image a belated objective reality.  There were even moments when, forgetting his physiognomy, Mr. Grew said to himself that if he’d had “half a chance” he might have done as well as Ronald; but this only fortified his resolve that Ronald should do infinitely better.

Ronald’s ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking well.  Mr. Grew constantly affirmed to himself that the boy was “not a genius”; but, barring this slight deficiency, he was almost everything that a parent could wish.  Even at Harvard he had managed to be several desirable things at once—­writing poetry in the college magazine, playing delightfully “by ear,” acquitting himself honorably in his studies, and yet holding his own in the fashionable sporting set that formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of Society.  Mr. Grew’s idealism did not preclude the frank desire that his son should pass through that gateway; but the wish was not prompted by material considerations.  It was Mr. Grew’s notion that, in the rough and hurrying current of a new civilization, the little pools of leisure and enjoyment must nurture delicate growths, material graces as well as moral refinements, likely to be uprooted and swept away by the rush of the main torrent.  He based his theory on the fact that he had liked the few “society” people he had met—­had found their manners simpler, their voices more agreeable, their views more consonant with his own, than those of the leading citizens of Wingfield.  But then he had met very few.

Ronald’s sympathies needed no urging in the same direction.  He took naturally, dauntlessly, to all the high and exceptional things about which his father’s imagination had so long sheepishly and ineffectually hovered—­from the start he was what Mr. Grew had dreamed of being.  And so precise, so detailed, was Mr. Grew’s vision of his own imaginary career, that as Ronald grew up, and began to travel in a widening orbit, his father had an almost uncanny sense of the extent to which that career was enacting itself before him.  At Harvard, Ronald had done exactly what the hypothetical Mason Grew would have done, had not his actual self, at the same age, been working his way up in old Slagden’s button factory—­the institution which was later to acquire fame, and even notoriety, as the birthplace of Grew’s Secure Suspender Buckle.  Afterward, at a period when the actual Grew had passed from the factory to the bookkeeper’s desk, his invisible double had been reading law at Columbia—­precisely again what Ronald did!  But it was when the young man left the paths laid out for him by the parental hand, and cast himself boldly on the world, that his adventures began to bear the most astonishing resemblance to those of the unrealized Mason Grew.  It was in New York that the scene of this hypothetical being’s first exploits had always been laid; and it was in New York that Ronald was to achieve his first triumph.  There was nothing small or timid about Mr. Grew’s imagination; it had never stopped at anything between Wingfield and the metropolis.  And the real Ronald had the same cosmic vision as his parent.  He brushed aside with a contemptuous laugh his mother’s tearful entreaty that he should stay at Wingfield and continue the dynasty of the Grew Suspender Buckle.  Mr. Grew knew that in reality Ronald winced at the Buckle, loathed it, blushed for his connection with it.  Yet it was the Buckle that had seen him through Groton, Harvard and the Law School, and had permitted him to enter the office of a distinguished corporation lawyer, instead of being enslaved to some sordid business with quick returns.  The Buckle had been Ronald’s fairy godmother—­yet his father did not blame him for abhorring and disowning it.  Mr. Grew himself often bitterly regretted having bestowed his own name on the instrument of his material success, though, at the time, his doing so had been the natural expression of his romanticism.  When he invented the Buckle, and took out his patent, he and his wife both felt that to bestow their name on it was like naming a battle-ship or a peak of the Andes.

Mrs. Grew had never learned to know better; but Mr. Grew had discovered his error before Ronald was out of school.  He read it first in a black eye of his boy’s.  Ronald’s symmetry had been marred by the insolent fist of a fourth former whom he had chastised for alluding to his father as “Old Buckles;” and when Mr. Grew heard the epithet he understood in a flash that the Buckle was a thing to blush for.  It was too late then to dissociate his name from it, or to efface from the hoardings of the entire continent the picture of two gentlemen, one contorting himself in the abject effort to repair a broken brace, while the careless ease of the other’s attitude proclaimed his trust in the Secure Suspender Buckle.  These records were indelible, but Ronald could at least be spared all direct connection with them; and from that day Mr. Grew resolved that the boy should not return to Wingfield.

“You’ll see,” he had said to Mrs. Grew, “he’ll take right hold in New York.  Ronald’s got my knack for taking hold,” he added, throwing out his chest.

“But the way you took hold was in business,” objected Mrs. Grew, who was large and literal.

Mr. Grew’s chest collapsed, and he became suddenly conscious of his comic face in its rim of sandy whiskers.  “That’s not the only way,” he said, with a touch of wistfulness which escaped his wife’s analysis.

“Well, of course you could have written beautifully,” she rejoined with admiring eyes.

“_ Written?_ Me!” Mr. Grew became sardonic.

“Why, those letters—­weren’t they beautiful, I’d like to know?”

The couple exchanged a glance, innocently allusive and amused on the wife’s part, and charged with a sudden tragic significance on the husband’s.

“Well, I’ve got to be going along to the office now,” he merely said, dragging himself out of his rocking-chair.

This had happened while Ronald was still at school; and now Mrs. Grew slept in the Wingfield cemetery, under a life-size theo-logical virtue of her own choosing, and Mr. Grew’s prognostications as to Ronald’s ability to “take right hold” in New York were being more and more brilliantly fulfilled.