6. Music Lessons

I realize that this is not the time or place for me to pause and deliver an address; but it must be done somewhere in this book, and it will be just as appropriate here as anywhere else. It was true, as Mama had said, that Papa wasn’t very well. He was sixty-two now and had been slowed up, more than a little, by the energy-sapping siege of flu. But he wasn’t going to let his physical condition discommode other people if he could help it.

But while we are on the subject I want to make a speech entitled, The Tyranny of the Chronic Invalid. I never spoke on this subject publicly before, but I wish I had; for it is an important matter.

I have known homes that were completely wrecked by a selfish old mother with “a heart condition” which she could turn on and off like a faucet. The utterly devastating thing about her heart ailment was she really did have an erratic heart. She had had her own way about everything for so long that when someone else in the family wanted to do something that mother objected to, the old lady would have a heart attack, a real one, too, that would bring the doctor at full gallop. And the family would have to give in, after which mother quickly pulled out of it.

Of course she needn’t have had these spells. She could have minded her own business, if she had any, and given the other members of the household a chance to live their lives with freedom and joy. I do hope that some nice old lady, who has been clubbing daughter Fanny with her bad ticker until son-in-law Bill goes alone to the bowling alley (or some place) of an evening, happens upon this book.

A few years ago I had a long, pathetic letter from a woman in her later thirties who had a good secretarial position and lived at home with her mother. Her brothers and sisters had married and were in homes of their own. Her mother loved her devotedly; much too devotedly, but she was not in very good health and any little fretting made her ill. Her mother, she wrote, would sit at the front window and wait for her return at five-forty-five, and if she was fifteen minutes late, she would find her mother badly upset. Several years before, she had fallen in love with a fine fellow who wanted her to marry him; but mother had cried and cried, and was really ill over it.

So, she had asked Jack if he would be willing to have mother live with them; and Jack hadn’t wanted to, but finally consented. Only now she had Mother to persuade that this would be a good way to settle it; but that had put Mother to bed. No, Mother had no particular objection to Jack; but we were so happy, just the two of us. And so, the letter went on, she had told Jack that they would have to give it up.

Only they hadn’t. That was the part of it that she wanted to tell me about. (I had thought I saw it coming; for the letter didn’t sound as if it had been written by someone with a red nose and swollen eyes caused by weeping.)

She had asked Mother, one day, if she could take care of herself all right if she went to visit Madge over the week-end. Madge lived a hundred miles away. Mother thought that would be fine. She would get along very well, by herself, over Sunday. So, she had left home Friday afternoon, but she hadn’t gone to visit Madge. She had written to Madge, telling her all about it, and Madge had replied “Goody!”