After that, Babbitt went to church regularly, except
on spring Sunday mornings which were obviously meant
for motoring. He announced to Ted, “I tell
you, boy, there’s no stronger bulwark of sound
conservatism than the evangelical church, and no better
place to make friends who’ll help you to gain
your rightful place in the community than in your own
church-home!”
Though he saw them twice daily, though he knew
and amply discussed every detail of their expenditures,
yet for weeks together Babbitt was no more conscious
of his children than of the buttons on his coat-sleeves.
The admiration of Kenneth Escott made him aware of
Verona.
She had become secretary to Mr. Gruensberg of the
Gruensberg Leather Company; she did her work with
the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and
never quite understands them; but she was one of the
people who give an agitating impression of being on
the point of doing something desperate—of
leaving a job or a husband—without ever
doing it. Babbitt was so hopeful about Escott’s
hesitant ardors that he became the playful parent.
When he returned from the Elks he peered coyly into
the living-room and gurgled, “Has our Kenny been
here to-night?” He never credited Verona’s
protest, “Why, Ken and I are just good friends,
and we only talk about Ideas. I won’t have
all this sentimental nonsense, that would spoil everything.”
It was Ted who most worried Babbitt.
With conditions in Latin and English but with a triumphant
record in manual training, basket-ball, and the organization
of dances, Ted was struggling through his Senior year
in the East Side High School. At home he was
interested only when he was asked to trace some subtle
ill in the ignition system of the car. He repeated
to his tut-tutting father that he did not wish to
go to college or law-school, and Babbitt was equally
disturbed by this “shiftlessness” and by
Ted’s relations with Eunice Littlefield, next
door.
Though she was the daughter of Howard Littlefield,
that wrought-iron fact-mill, that horse-faced priest
of private ownership, Eunice was a midge in the sun.
She danced into the house, she flung herself into
Babbitt’s lap when he was reading, she crumpled
his paper, and laughed at him when he adequately explained
that he hated a crumpled newspaper as he hated a broken
sales-contract. She was seventeen now. Her
ambition was to be a cinema actress. She did
not merely attend the showing of every “feature
film;” she also read the motion-picture magazines,
those extraordinary symptoms of the Age of Pep-monthlies
and weeklies gorgeously illustrated with portraits
of young women who had recently been manicure girls,
not very skilful manicure girls, and who, unless their
every grimace had been arranged by a director, could
not have acted in the Easter cantata of the Central
Methodist Church; magazines reporting, quite seriously,
in “interviews” plastered with pictures
of riding-breeches and California bungalows, the views
on sculpture and international politics of blankly
beautiful, suspiciously beautiful young men; outlining
the plots of films about pure prostitutes and kind-hearted
train-robbers; and giving directions for making bootblacks
into Celebrated Scenario Authors overnight.
