Sacrament

A STORY OF A MAN, HIS SON, AND HIS MOTHER-IN-LAW

ALLAN SEAGER

Mr. Tim Moore, the district leader, was making his speech to thank all the members of the club for their efforts in the last election.

"And I wants to thank all of yez for your cooperation. If the members of the Tecumseh Social Club works together every year like we done this year, and all the candidates of the party gets elected, I personally can be in the position to cooperate with all of yez like we have done so many years in the past ..."

Joe Leary sat in the front row, almost under the leader's paunch, thinking of a sacrament. The leader's hoarse words went over his head, unheard. It was a sacrament, He had always heard that. If you got married and did not have children, you had not consummated a sacrament. It was a duty. He had not done his duty, he and Millie, and he couldn't see how they ever could. Nine years they had been married, and Millie's mother had come to live on them a year after they had been to the church. He could feed three on his pay, twenty-one fifty a week, billing clerk. He could feed three, and for eight years the third one had been the old woman, Millie's mother, sitting in the rocking chair by the window. She was no good to anyone, a dull, deaf old woman, better off dead. Millie knew it, but she was the old woman's daughter.

He and Millie had talked about it for years, at night, in bed, with the door closed, and the old woman snoring on the couch in the other room, as strong as a horse. She might not die for ten years. One night Joe had dreamed that the old woman was lying in a crib, a crib where a son might lie if he could ever get himself born. She had been lying in the crib like a baby; well, she might as well be a baby, always rocking back and forth by the window.

He could think of no way to consummate the sacrament. There was a way, of course, but it was murder. He had thought of that often enough in bed at night when Millie had gone to sleep. Hut murder was forbidden, and he knew he could not do it. Confused in his mind with the sacrament, a word which always made him think of the darkness in a church and people kneeling and the words of the Mass resonant among the arches, was his desire for a son, but he had thought about it so long and so sternly that he saw the whole thing as a duty, a duty which he could see no way to perform.

"—and with the interests of good government at your hearts, I sincerely hope the members of the club will give me your loyal support and work to get the vote out like we done this year. I thank each and every one of yez."

The leader had finished, and he sat down mopping his bald head while hundreds of hands beat together, stirring the thick blue smoke in the hall. The leader was a great man. People said admiringly that he made a hundred thousand a year out of the district. No one could put up a building in it without his approval.

Ihe meeting was over, and the crowd stood up to stretch and shake hands with one another. At the meetings, you always shook hands with everyone in sight, as a ritual. Joe got up and shook hands to the right and the left, and, at last, stopped in front of the leader.

"That was nice work you done, Joe, nice work." The leader clapped Joe on the shoulder, "If there's any little thing you want, come up and see me about it: any little thing."

Joe was embarrassed by the great man, and he knew that his work in the election campaign had been small, climbing stairways over delicatessens and billiard halls to urge frightened Italians to come to the polls, and he knew he could not seriously ask for anything, so he passed it off lightly, smiling.

"Well, Mr. Moore, there's just two things I want, I guess. I'd like somebody to give me a thousand bucks and I'd like somebody to kill my mother-in-law."

The leader had a literal mind. That was the reason for his success as a politician. He said, frowning seriously, "Times are hard, Joe, or maybe I could get you a little dough. Tell me about your mother-in-law."

When he spoke of the mother-in-law, he could see Joe's face change, and he said, "Come on into the office, Joe, and tell me about it."

The leader took Joe into the office in the corner of the hall and closed the door.

When Joe went home that night, and tiptoed into the bedroom, he took Millie by the shoulder, "It's me, lion. Wake up. I got something to tell you."

Outside the bedroom, on the couch, lay the old woman snoring, strong as a horse.

Every evening, Millie's mother would sit rocking by the window, looking placidly down into the street, watching the red and blue signs of the chop-houses, just the color of the fireworks Millie had on the Fourth of July when she was a little girl; and the swift orange taxis; and the children batting balls against the brick wall over there. And when she looked down at the fruit stand on the corner, with the red and orange globes in neat pyramids, she hardly saw them as apples and oranges, but quickly her mind turned to the apple pies she had baked and all the marmalade she had put up.

She did not mind it when the elevated shook the room as it passed. Her ears bothered her lately, and she heard the roar only dimly. Millie had been frightened by a freight train, when they lived near the tracks in Scranton. It was on her eighth birthday, yes, it was her eighth, and she had run into the house screaming with fear, and whenever she heard the faint roaring of the elevated, she remembered the terrible freight engine. She was seventy-six years old, and Millie was her favorite and youngest daughter. Her memory, now that she was old, filtered everything she saw or heard and presented it to her in the shapes of the past, so that what happened now was only the echo of something else long ago.

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Sometimes she wondered vaguely about Joseph. He and Millie didn't seem to get along very well. His face was always strained and white, and he flew into tempers easily. At night, when he came home with his arms full of groceries, he went straight into the little kitchen, and closed the door to talk to Millie, cooking the dinner. Once she remembered quite clearly what he had said, a high, strident voice through the kitchen door, "Good God, Millie, how many times have I got to tell you? We ain't got enough money. Shut up about it, will you?" He didn't make enough money, that was plain. Her husband had always been a good provider, but then, Joseph was not like her husband. It was too bad, because she knew that Millie liked fine clothes better than anything, and she hoped that Millie wasn't nagging Joseph to buy her a dress or a coat with fur on it. She meant to speak to Millie about it, but it had slipped her mind.

At night when the other two had gone to bed, she would often get up from the couch with a blanket, and sit by the window, rocking, her mind wandering aimlessly through the past, remembering her marriage and Millie's childhood, an old woman who sat by a window in the night.

So she received the news quite calmly, without regret, without thinking much about it at all. Millie said to her, one evening, "Now, mother, Joe has had his pay cut again, and we're going to have to put you in a nice home, where you'll be well taken care of. You'll get good food and we can come to see you often."

Millie and Joe both seemed ready to say more, but she said with a mild asperity, "Yes, Millie, I know Joseph doesn't earn much money. It's very hard on you, I must say. I recall that little dotted Swiss you used to wear, and those lovely hair ribbons. You were a very pretty child, and, my, how you loved all the nice things your father gave you. It's too bad you can't have them now. Yes, you were a pretty child."

Millie suddenly began to cry, and Joe spoke up loudly, "Now, Mom. you sit still, and I'll pack your things and get them all ready for tomorrow."

She watched Millie cry and thought how different she had looked as a little girl. Why, now Millie looked old and thin, almost a stranger. It was pleasanter to remember her playing dolls on the grass beside the house in Scranton.

In the morning an ambulance came, and they made her lie down on the little cot in it, as if she were sick. Joe and Millie talked and fidgeted every minute, and they kept arranging her pillow, and even making jokes until she wondered what was the matter with them.

After a long ride through the city, during which she could look through the window of the ambulance into taxicabs and the backs of trucks, they went through the gates of a high wall, and down a driveway across a green lawn, stopping before a big white building. It was a clear day with bright sunshine, and the flower beds around the building looked pretty in the sunlight.

"Such pretty flowers, Millie," she said.

"Yes, mother. I think you're going to like it here."

Joe had already got out of the ambulance and gone ahead to talk to a man who came out of the building. "Yes, this is the case Tim Moore called you about. He'll send you the papers on it. No, we won't need anyone—she won't make no trouble."

She thought it strange that Joe and Millie both cried when they left her, especially since they had been so lively in the ambulance on the way.

They put her in a long room with white walls, and two rows of beds, each with a rocking chair and a small table beside it. She liked the rocking chair, and the food was good, just as Millie had said it would be, only it was queer that the woman in the next chair had to be fed because she dropped her food all over her dress if she tried to feed herself, and the woman sang all day the same little song. And she was surprised when other women in the ward had screamed and shouted, and one had thrown her little table through the window and men had taken her out.

It was nearly a week before she realized that Joe and Millie had put her in an insane asylum. When the thought exploded in her head, she got up quickly from the rocking chair and ran trembling to the door of the ward. The guard stopped her.

"I want to see the superintendent. You can't keep me here. You can't do it. I'm not crazy," she said. "I'm not crazy."

But the guard led her gently back to her chair and gave her a pencil and paper, telling her to write a letter to her people and explain matters. Day after day, she wrote to Joe and Millie, with shaking hands, clinging to the pencil, writing feverishly, knowing that, if she stopped, she would begin to wonder if she were mad, like the other women around her.

Each day the guard would take the letter she had written and drop it into the wastebasket outside the door of the ward. He wrote on his report that she never made any trouble.

She never did, really; she was too busy writing, explaining to Millie the terrible mistake. Over and over, she had to write to her daughter, because she did not seem to make herself very clear, for Millie's answers promised no help but only said that she and Joe were expecting a child.