Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? Read Online Free PDF Page B

Afterward, it occurred to her that the last sound her mother must have heard was the friendly hissing of the rain falling from the sky. That was a comfort to her because the rain always had seemed magical to Dorothy.
    It rained every day the rest of that week. The family accompanied the coffin from the funeral parlor in Long Branch, across the gray water on the ferry, then uptown to the Bloomingdale Reformed Church near their house. It was still pouring on Saturday when they gathered on a muddy knoll at Woodlawn Cemetery and watched the coffin sink into the soggy ground. Due to the swiftness of Eliza’s demise, an autopsy had been performed. Her death certificate gave the cause of death as “diarrhea with colic followed by weakness of the heart. Postmortem showed artery disease.” As some of Dorothy’s adult behavior suggests, she could never rid herself of the guilty suspicion that she somehow had caused Eliza’s death.
     
     
    Her mother, Dorothy said, “promptly went and died on me.” Her short stories were understandably devoid of loving mothers—indeed, there is not a one in the whole lot. Hazel Morse’s mother in “Big Blonde,” a “hazy” woman who had died, most closely resembles her own situation with Eliza. Many of her mothers are either indifferent or actively abusive to their children. Camilla, in “Horsie,” dismisses her newborn daughter with the chilling words, “Good night, useless.” Fan Durant, a woman intimidated by her husband, can’t prevent his disposing of the children’s pet while they sleep.
    Most autobiographical in Dorothy’s gallery of mothers is Mrs. Matson, in “Little Curtis,” who adopts a four-year-old boy for questionable motives, then treats him so sadistically that one could almost applaud matricide. In the story of young Curtis, first called “Lucky Little Curtis,” Dorothy drew on her experience with the second Mrs. Rothschild.
     
     
    Eleanor Frances Lewis, a retired teacher, was forty-eight, the same age as Henry Rothschild. Never married, she lived with a younger brother a dozen blocks from the Rothschilds. Coming from working-class people—her father had been an upholsterer—she had managed by thrift, hard work, and living as a maiden aunt in the homes of her brothers to accumulate a nest egg of nearly five thousand dollars, plus her investment of five shares in a teachers’ building and loan association.
    For Henry, Eliza’s death had been a catastrophe. He alternately struggled to remember and to forget her. Finding unbearable the memories associated with the house on Seventy-second Street, he quickly sold it and moved to a rented house a half-block away, then six months later gave that up and purchased an exquisite limestone row house on West Sixty-eighth Street near Central Park. By this time, Henry had met and decided to marry Eleanor Lewis, the second Christian schoolteacher he liberated from spinsterhood. The new house symbolized his determination to build a new life for himself and to have someone care for his children. On the first business day after the start of the new century, January 3, 1900, Henry and Eleanor were married at City Hall. The bride stated that it was her first marriage. So did the groom, an unconscious mistake on Henry’s part or else the clerk’s pen slipped.
    None of the Rothschild children liked Eleanor, and Dorothy hated her. Never would she be able to understand or forgive her father for what appeared to be his unaccountably hasty betrayal of Eliza. Harry, Bert, and Helen, now eighteen, sixteen, and thirteen, expressed their coldness by addressing their stepmother as “Mrs. Rothschild.” Although she urged them to call her mother, explaining that “Mrs.” hurt her feelings, they had no interest in soothing her feelings. Dorothy refused to address her at all. “I didn’t call her anything. ‘Hey, you,’ was about the best I could do.” It is not difficult to imagine the size of the problem facing the new Mrs.