menu_book Chapter 22

Book II, Chapter 5, Sections 4 through 6 of Bread. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Wild Shimmering Path. Bread by Charles G. Norris. Book II, Chapter 5, Sections 4 through 6. The bungalow at Cohasset Beach at first sight consoled her in some degree for giving up the

apartment. The little house was charming and charmingly situated. It had been built a few years before by a rich old lady, an invalid, who had been compelled to pass her days in a wheelchair which she operated herself. Because of the chair, the house had been planned bungalow fashion, though there was an upstairs of two small bedrooms and an extra bath, and the doorways between rooms had been made particularly wide to permit the easy passage of the chair.

Inside there were oak floors throughout, a spacious fireplace, and an oak-timbered ceiling in a generous-sized living room, off which opened two bedrooms and, opposite, the dining room. There was an acre or so of unkempt ground about the house with some gnarled old apple trees, in blossom when Jeanette first saw them, and at the rear the ground sloped down to a rush-bordered pool in whose ripple-less surface all the colors of the sky, blossoming trees, and bordering reeds

were intensified in glorious reflection. A white cow stood upon her own inverted image at the farther side. There was no view of the sound, the bungalow was a good mile from the water, but it was picturesquely set, and Jeanette felt since she had been forced to abandon the city, she could not have found a home in the country that suited her better. The move from town was accomplished without a hitch.

Even Hilda was successfully transplanted. Jeanette set herself determinedly to work to fit herself and her furniture into the new environment, and was surprised to discover how easily both were accomplished. Expenses alone distressed her. The vans which brought down the household effects cost more than she had expected,

and she was obliged to order more furniture and rugs to make the new home attractive. Unfortunately, the bungalow had casement windows, and this necessitated cutting and remaking all her curtains. Some, in addition, too, were needed for the living room, and Jeanette had decided that scrim would be both practical and economical, but the clerk in the store had shown her a soft, lovely material stamped with a design of long green grasses and iris, which he assured her was

sunfast. The pale purple and green in the goods had appealed to her as so unusually beautiful and effective that she had not been able to resist getting it. She decided to plant iris about the house in the long, narrow strips of flower beds, and to carry iris as a motif throughout the place. In a Fifth Avenue shop, there was some china that had a pattern of fleur-de-lis in its center, and her heart was set on someday acquiring it for her new home.

Martin was immediately elected to the family yacht club. The Gibses had him and his wife to dinner, and invited the Websters and another couple to make their acquaintance. Mrs. Rudolph Drigo and Mrs. Bloom, who were neighbors, called also Dr. Weingartner of the Episcopal Church.

Alice, Roy, and the children spent a Sunday with her sister, and Alice was enthusiastic about everything. She told Roy they would have to find a house of their own at Cohasset Beach without delay. Summer had arrived before Jeanette was half aware of its approach. The weather turned glorious.

The dogwood came and went. The country was full of sweet scents. Robins and thrushes sang with open throbbing throats in the apple trees and hopped about in the shade. The frogs shrilled musically at evening in the pool, but Jeanette did not find the happiness

for which she hoped. She tried to be content. She sought for joy in her new life and surroundings. She found none. Too many things were wrong. Over and over again she decided it was hopeless.

First of all, there was the family yacht club, which Martin loved and she despised. She had known beforehand what it was going to be like, and closer acquaintance proved her premise to have been correct. All year round, residents of Cohasset Beach made up its membership. There were less than 3,000 people in the Long Island village during the winter. It was only in summer that the place became fashionable.

Among those who belonged to the little yacht club Jeanette soon discovered were Tim Birdswell, the village plumber, Zeb Klein, a contractor hardly better than a carpenter, Fritz Wiggins, who kept an electrical equipment store on Washington Street, Steve Teschemacher and Adolf Kuntz,

who were real estate agents and were interested in a development known as Cohasset Park. Then there were the local dentist and his wife, the local attorney and his helpmate, and the local doctor, who seemed to be of a better sort than the rest and was fortunately unmarried. The ladies took an active part in the social life of the Yacht Club, and Stel Teschemacher,

chairwoman of the Entertainment Committee, went early to call upon the new member's wife to invite her to come to the 500 Club meeting on the following Friday afternoon. There was a sprinkling of others who boasted of a slightly more exalted social status. Mrs. Drigo's husband operated a large ice plant in New York City. Mrs. Bloom was the wife of the well-known confectioner, and Percy Webster was connected with an advertising agency. If there were more

interesting members, they kept themselves aloof. At least, Jeanette did not meet them. Once when she was describing to her mother with a good deal of relish the type of people who belonged to this club, and was referring to the list of members in the club's annual booklet, she was surprised to come upon the name of Lester Short and that of a prominent magazine editor well known to her. She asked Herbert Gibbs about these people at an early opportunity,

but elicited nothing more satisfactory from him than, Oh, they come round occasionally. If such was the case, Jeanette was unable to identify them. She was interested to learn later that Lester Short and his wife had six children and lived about half a mile beyond the village in the region known as The Point. Martin had no fault to find with his new friends. He was welcomed into their hearts. He charmed them all. He was

acclaimed immediately the most popular member, and was appointed by the Commodore, Old Jess Higginbotham, affable, decrepit, and rich, and owner of most of the acres Teschenmacher, and Kuntz were trying to sell as choice lots in Cohasset Park, to serve on the entertainment committee with Stel Teschenmacher. Martin was enchanted with the cordiality with which he was accepted. He thought Zeb Klein, Fritz Wiggins, young Doc French, corking good scouts. Zeb and

Fritz were a little rough, perhaps, but they were regular fellows. Steve Teschenmacher was as funny as a crutch, and his partner Adolf Kuntz had about as sharp and shrewd a mind as Martin had ever encountered. Why, you ought to hear Adolf talk politics, he told his wife enthusiastically. He knows more about what's going on up in Albany right this minute than all the newspapers in New York. You ought to hear him tell some of his experiences in the Republican Party. He might

be interesting and clever, everything Martin said of him, but to Jeanette he seemed uncouth, ill-bred, a spitter of tobacco juice. When the Yacht Club formally opened its summer season, Jeanette put on her prettiest frock and went with her husband to the dance with which it was inaugurated. It was one of the efforts she made to adapt herself to the village life. She loved to dance. Swimming, sailing, tennis did not appeal to her, but from the dances in

the clubhouse she hoped she might derive a certain amount of genuine pleasure. On the night of the affair, after studying the reflection in her mirror, she had decided she had never looked so well. With truth, she could say she was a beautiful woman, and in this estimate of herself she found ample confirmation in Martin's eyes. They hired a hack and drove over to the club. But for the young wife it proved a dismal experience. The yokels, the plumber, the

electrician, the carpenter, the dentist, and real estate agents were afraid to approach her, not that she wanted them to, and she had been left to the favor of Herbert Gibbs, Doc French, and the old Commodore. The women eyed her covertly, whispered about her and her gown, and made no advances. Herbert Gibbs danced with her once, twice. Martin was three times her partner. Commodore Higginbotham had passed his gallivanting days. Doc French, whom she liked and to whom she

would have been glad to be cordial, did not dance at all. The floor was rough and uneven, the music lugubrious. Three small boys kept up a fearful racket playing with some folding chairs stacked in a corner. She watched Martin whirling and wheeling about the floor, his face a broad grin, his eyes and teeth flashing, talking, laughing, exchanging an endless banter with other couples, answering here, there, and everywhere to calls of Martin and Mart. At half past ten she could

stand no more of it. She knew she was dragging her husband away from a hilarious good time, but she was bored, disgusted with the whole evening and the hoidenish, loud-voiced village folk. She would never make the mistake of going to another of their wretched dances. Martin could go if he wanted to. If he liked to hobnob with such people, he could do so to his heart's content. She wouldn't raise one word of objection, but wild horses wouldn't drag her

there again. In a fortnight there was another dance at the club, and this time Martin took himself to the party alone while Jeanette went to bed with a magazine. He woke her up when he came home a little after twelve and told her he had had a wonderful good time and that Lester Short, his wife, and their two older children had been present. But Jeanette had no regrets. The Shorts and her husband could enjoy the society of the plumbers and carpenters and their wives if they

chose to do so. She felt satisfied that if she had gone she would have been miserable. Besides the Yacht Club, there were other things in the new order of existence that proved annoying. Meat and vegetables cost considerably more at Cohasset Beach than in the city, and everything else was proportionally dearer. Jeanette had thought she might save a little on her marketing in the country,

and it was discouraging to discover that this was quite impossible. She certainly had not expected to find that prices were actually higher. Then there was not nearly the same variety from which to choose in the stores here as there had been in the groceries, and particularly the meat markets of Amsterdam and Columbus Avenues. She and Martin were especially fond of lamb kidneys, which she used to buy at the rate of three for five cents in New York.

Pulitzers at Cohasset Beach never seemed to have them, and even more exasperating was the fact that fish could only be had on Thursdays, when the fishman came around blowing his horn. The neighborhood, too, was a source of discomfort. Jeanette discovered, within a few days after they had moved into the bungalow, that the reason so attractive a house had been for rent at such a figure,

with its acre and more of ground, its apple trees and pond and picturesque setting, was that it was situated on the wrong side of town, beyond the railroad tracks a mile from the water. The desirable residential section of Cohasset Beach was that in which the Herbert Gibses lived, on the hill overlooking the Sound.

A block from the bungalow, their rear yards abutting upon the railroad tracks, was a row of shabby cottages occupied by laborers, Polacks mostly, who worked in the quarries down on the point. Here fences sagged and refuse littered the roadway. Dirty children scrambled about and screamed at one another, drying laundry fluttered from clotheslines,

and fat dark women in calicos and shuffling shoes gossiped from doorstep to doorstep. On Saturday nights there were invariably celebrations among these people at which, from the singing and general racket, it was evident that red wine flowed freely, and the doleful whine of an accordion accompanying hoarse masculine voices rose dismally from sundown until the early morning hours, interrupted by shouts of rollicking laughter. Martin assured

his wife that these people were simple creatures, peasants transplanted but a few years from their native soil, celebrating after a week of toil, in a harmless, jovial way after the fashion to which, in the old country, they had been accustomed. But Jeanette found it disturbing, not a little frightening, especially on those nights when Martin went off to the yacht club and left her alone with only Hilda in the house. Lastly, mosquitoes, germinated in the pond within a

hundred yards of her own door, made their appearance in hungry numbers early in July. The pool was practically stagnant, without visible outlet, and the neighbor who owned it and who operated a small dairy refused to oil it as his cows watered there. The bungalow windows were unscreened. Jeanette did not understand how she had failed to notice the fact when she first inspected the premises. The matter had to be remedied immediately, or life would be unsupportable.

The landlord declined to do anything. Martin thought perhaps they could endure the nuisance until cold weather came, but his wife declared that unthinkable. If the windows were shut with the lights on, the bungalow became unsufferably hot and stuffy. If left open, moths, winged bugs, every kind of flying insect of the night together with the pests bred in the stagnant pool, flew in to buzz about the globes and torment

those beneath them. Zeb Klein agreed to equip the bungalow with screens. The frames would have to be fitted to the insides of the windows on account of there being casement. For sixty-five dollars, and Jeanette, angered by Martin's complacent acceptance of the circumstances and his indifferent attitude towards that for which she felt him largely responsible, told the carpenter to go ahead. There were days when in the seclusion of her own bedroom she gave way freely to her tears.

She wanted to be happy. She wanted to be a good manager of her house, a good wife to Martin. Life often seemed to demand more from her than she was capable of giving. Concede, concede, concede. It was all concession for her. Martin gave nothing.