Laughing Last - Jane Abbott (portable ebook reader .txt) 📗

Not the least of the dissatisfactions that had grown in Sidney’s breast was belonging to an Estate.

Since the death of Joseph Romley four years earlier, the royalties from his published verse and the government bonds and the oil stock, that had never paid any dividend but might any year, and the four young daughters were managed by two trustees who had been college friends of the poet and who, even in his lifetime, had managed what of his affairs had had any managing. One was a banker and one was a lawyer and they lived in New York, making only rare visits to Middletown. They considered it far better for Isolde and Trude to visit them twice a year and to such an arrangement both older girls were quite agreeable.

But Sidney, knowing the Trustees only as two brusque busy men who talked rapidly and called her “mouse” and “youngster” and brought her childish presents and huge boxes of candy which never contained her favorite chocolate alligators, found them embarrassingly lacking in the dramatic qualities a “guardian,” to be of any value to a girl, should possess. Nor did they ever bother their heads in the least as to what she did or didn’t do! In fact no one did. There seemed to be only one law that controlled her and everything in the big old house—what one could afford to do! She disliked the word.

She resented, too, the Middletown Branch of the League of American Poets. This was a band of women and a scattering of men who had pledged to foster the art of verse-making; a few of them really wrote poetry, a few more understood it, the greater number belonged to the League as Associates. Before Joseph Romley’s death Sidney had thought them only very funny because her father and Trude and Isolde thought them funny. There had been then a great timidity in their approach. They had seemed to tremble in their adoring gratitude for a hastily scrawled autograph; they had sometimes knocked at the back door and with deep apologies asked if they might slip in very quietly and take a time exposure of THE desk where Joseph Romley worked. They brought senseless gifts which they left unobtrusively on the piano or the hall rack. They dragged their own daughters to the old house for awkwardly formal calls upon Isolde and Trude. But after her father’s death even Sidney realized that the League ladies were different. They were not shy any more, they swooped down upon the little household and cleaned and baked and sewed and “deared” the four girls, actually almost living in the house. Isolde and Trude had made no protest and had gone around with troubled faces and had talked far into the nights in the bed which they shared. Then one morning at breakfast Isolde had announced: “The League has paid the mortgage on this house so that we can keep our home here. It is very good of them—I’m sure I don’t know where we could have gone. We must show them how grateful we are.” And Sidney had come to know, by example and the rebukes cast her way by Isolde, that “showing them” meant living, not as they might want to live—but as the League expected the four daughters of a great poet to live. That was the price for the mortgage. The League wanted to say possessively: “This is Joseph Romley’s second daughter” or “That is our lamb who was only ten months old when the poor mother died. I am sure the great man would not have known what to do if it had not been for old Huldah Mueller who stayed on and took care of the house and the children for him. He wrote a sonnet to Huldah once. It was worth a month’s wages to the woman—” And the League had bought its right to that possessive tone. Sidney, when Isolde could not see, indulged in naughty faces behind stout Mrs. Milliken’s back and confided to her chum, Nancy Stevens, the story of how Dad had once, in a rage of impatience, called down to the adoring Mrs. Milliken, waiting in the hall for an autograph: “Madam, if you don’t go off at once and leave me alone I’ll come down to you in my pajamas! I tell you I’ve gone to bed.” Oh, Mrs. Milliken had fled then!

Sidney had to go to Miss Downs’ stupid private day school when she would have preferred the Middletown High (as long as she could not go away to a boarding school), simply because Miss Downs was one of the directors of the League and gave her her tuition as a scholarship.

But Sidney had never thought—until Isolde had spoken so strangely a moment before—that her sisters minded either the Trustees or the League or having to be “different.” Isolde naturally was everything the League wanted her to be, with her grave eyes and her cloudy hair with the becoming fillets and her drawling voice and her clever smocks. Trude always wanted to oblige everyone anyway, and Vicky was so pretty that it didn’t make any difference what she did. Sidney had considered that she was alone in her rebellion, a rebellion that had flamed in her outburst of the morning: “I’m sick of being different!”

Isolde’s words of a moment before, with their hard hint of some portentous meaning, started a train of thought now in Sidney’s mind that drove away all joy in the promise of the next Egg, that made her even forget her dislike of the duty Isolde had so unexpectedly put upon her. Isolde had said distinctly: “You can’t get away from it—look at me—look at Trude!” And it had sounded queer, bitter, as though somewhere down deep in her Isolde nursed an unhappy feeling about something. Sidney pondered, lingering in the deserted dining room. Maybe, after all, Isolde did not like being the daughter of a poet and her smocks and her fillets and all the luncheons and teas to which she had to go and the speeches of appreciation she had to make. And what did Trude dislike? She always seemed happy but maybe she wanted something. Sidney remembered once hearing Trude cry terribly hard in the study. She and Dad had been talking at dinner about college. They had come to the door of the study and Dad had said: “It can’t be done, sonny.” That’s what Dad had always called Trude because she was the boy of the family. Trude had come out with her face all shiny with tears and her father had stood on the threshold of the door with his hair rumpled and his nose twitching the way it did when something bothered him. That was probably it. Trude had wanted college. That seemed silly to Sidney who hated lessons, at least the kind Miss Downs gave, but it was too bad to have good old Trude, who was such a peach, want anything.

Isolde hadn’t included Vicky, but then Vicky couldn’t want anything. She wasn’t afraid to fly in the faces of the Trustees and the whole League and they wouldn’t mind if she did. She was as clever as she was pretty. She could take the old dresses which Mrs. Custer and Mrs. White, the Trustees’ wives, and Mrs. Deering whom Isolde had visited in Chicago, and Godmother Jocelyn sent every now and then and make the stunningest new dresses. And once an artist from New York had painted her portrait and exhibited it in Paris and had won a medal for it. The League ladies approved of that and always told of it.

Vicky had whole processions of beaux who came and crowded in the chairs in the front room or