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Alabama - Mrs. Blanchard, Professional Mother 6
"When our goodhyes were said, my mother cried, and implored Mr. Fenton to be good to her little Cissie. My father embraced me in silence. But my brother, with the casual frankness of the seventeen year old boy, whispered, as he gave me a farewell kiss...'Take care of yourself, Cissie. Papa says you've made a terrible mistake.'
"Perhaps I have! The thought stabbed me with a premonition of disaster as Mr. Fenton assisted me into the cab, and slammed the door upon a shower of rice, and a babel of goodbyes and good wishes.
"Learn to look out for yourself, Cissie,' my father called from where he was standing on the porch steps. 'and don't forget the old folks at home.'
"Though his words caused me to break - for an instant into tears and to vow I would think of them every moment of the time we were apart, I am ashamed to say, that I literally forgot their existence during the ensuing days with Mr. Fenton in Oklahoma City,
"For in something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue, I had married the man who most completely represented the ideal of which all young girls foolishly dream, and hundreds of miles away from those I knew and loved, I was embarking upcn the most stupendous adventure in a woman's life.
"Having entered whole-heartedly into the esperience of home-making, our little apartment, with its green and yellow carpet; its golden-oak furniture and ruffled lace curtains at the windows, seemed to me, the most beautiful spot in the world. I know now that it wasn't much. But I thought that it was perfect; just as I thought Mr. Fenton was perfect.
"I suppose all brides who are very much in love at the time they are married, go through that stage when the King can do no wrong. It's all a part of life I believe, and except for this period of bedazzlement, a lot of marriages wouldn't last long enough for the ink to dry out on the marriage certificate.
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"As it was, all manner of humiliating sacrifices were exacted of me, and I was not even aware that anything in our little menage was amiss.
"Mr. Fenton had explained to me at the heginning, that I must practice the most rigid economy so that he might succeed with the costly inventions into which he was sinking the major portion of his salary. So quite as a matter of course, I ate what he left on his plate in the morning. At supper I rarely ate at all. Only at the mid-day meal did I have adequate food. Consequently with no money to buy tidbits on which to nibble vetween meals, I was always more or less famished. Mr. Fenton paid all the bills himself. So there was no way I could eke out a few pennies from a household allowance. Yet I did not feel badly treated. And when I wrote my first letter home I said,....!
"Dearest folks: You simply cannot imagine my happiness. It is something that would have to be seen to be appreciated.' And it was. Fortunately however, they were too far away, to grasp the actual conditions, or to realize how intangible my happiness really was.
"My two oldest children, Frances and little Jamie, were born in Oklahoma City. Mr. Fenton worshiped the children, and was never mean or niggardly to them as he was to me. By the time Frances was five, and Jamie four, their father was manager of a cotton-seed oil company, and we were financially able to have anything Mr. Fenton desired.
"Then the company transferred him to Atlanta, Georgia, and my real troubles began.
"A few months after we moved to Georgia, little Jamie died with membranous croup, and though I had been the most devoted of mothers, and never at any moment neglected either of the children, he blamed me for the loss of his son and my life was made unbearable,
"I loved my boy even more than he did. But after Jamie died, Mr. Fenton pretended to think I had never cared anything about his child.
"I would be awakened at night by him standing over me saying, 'You
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let my child die. You let my child die. I ciaght to kill you, I ought to strangle you to death, as he strangled. But no, you are alive, while he is dead.'
"I tried to tell him that life meant nothing to me. But he would not listen. It was impossible to make him understand. And I ceased to try. When he had a large placard printed in letters proclaiming, 'The Child of a Careful Mother Never Dies,' and hung the Lie in our bedroom, I never looked at it but once. And when he came home in the evenings and started walking the floor, moaning, 'Oh my boy, my boy! How I miss him!' I simply closed my ears to his reproaches.
"I thought when I told him I was expecting another child, it would make a difference, but he acted like a madman. 'What!' he cried. 'Another child! For God and its mother to strangle to death! Neverl I'll kill it first. I'll not support the child if its born. And I'll not give you one cent to buy clothes for it in the meantime.
"You will hardly believe it, but he was as good as his word. Not one cent would he give me - for any purpose at that time. Yet my, baby when it was born - had clothes ... beautiful clothes.
"I went to the store where Mr. Fenton paid his bill every week. I explained the situation to the wife of the grocer, and he added a dollar a week to our bill. The washerwoman added twenty-five cents a week to her bill, and the combined sum was mine to buy clothes my baby needed. He had the prettiest layette too, I believe, of all my children.
"My father sent me the money to pay the doctor, and the nurse. And when little Herbert was bom, the doctor said he was the prettiest baby he had ever seen. Mr. Fenton wouldn't look at him for a long time. Then one day he saw him on the street with the girl I employed to take the baby out in the afternoon. 'What a beautiful baby, nurse,' he said, 'Whose child is this?'
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"'Hit's Miz Tom Fenton's baby suh,' the nurse replied. 'An' you looks to me lak his pa.'
"From that moment he took charge of the baby. If anything he loved him more than he had loved Jamie, He resumed his old affectionate attitude toward Frances, who was then nine years old. And he tried to woo me back with the boastful, braggadocio promises I had once found so alluring. But somehow it all seemed as flat to me as an omelet without eggs. The curtain went up. But the show. just didn't come off. Everything between Mr. Fenton and me was ended. I cared no longer if he made a hundred million dollars on the inventions he talked of incessantly; or if he starved to death in a garret. By this time I knew he cared nothing for anyone but himself, and the little gadgets he thought would bring him wealth and fame. I had discovered that not even his love for the children was sincere. He had become as heartless and mechanical as the bits of steel or iron with which he toyed incessantly. And I was not surprised one day when he suggested that the children and I spend the stunmer with my family in Montgomery.
"'It will be cheaper and better - for me - in every way,' he said, as he eyed me furtively, 'To board you and the children for awhile with your people, I'll send you the money every month for your expenses, but it won't cost me as much as it does to keep up a house. Then what I save, can be used to push that new peanut roaster I have just patented. Johnston says it's a humdinger and ought to clean up a million. What do you say to that, Cissie? Are you willing to help me out?'
"I had'helped out' so many times and in so many ways, that one more try didn't make much difference. So I agreed to take the children and come home for the summer.
"I thought if all else failed, that home was one place where I would find welcome. My father had assured me that if I ever wanted to
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come home again, they would always he glad to have me. But when I was finally, forced to return to them, I was not received as rapturously as I had expected to be. The children complicated matters. They ate too much.. they made too much noise. They wore out their clothes, particularly their shoes, too quickly. And too little money was provided for their maintenance.
"My father was old, and his business was not what it had been. My sister, a school teacher, was saving for her old age. My brother was a rising young lawyer with a long way to go. My mother was getting old, and the children made her nervous,
"In the Spring, before I came home, I had been glad to leave Mr, Fenton. But I was glad too when I returned to him at the end of the summer.
"During our absence he had made fifty thousand dollars on one of his many patented inventions. So with seven thousand dollars, he bought a nice home, and to my amazement, gave me the money to furnish it quite attractively. I began to hope he was taking an interest in something besides inventions. But the next Spring he told me I would have to take the children and go home again for the summer.
"This time he did not send me any money at all. I sold the diamond ring my father bad given me years before for three hundred dollars, and gave part of that toward the household expenses which two children and another adult naturally increased, and used the rest of it to buy winter clothes for myself and the two children.
"That winter and for several years afterward, there was no task at home too menial for me to perform, I was so anxious to make myself wanted again by my parents, and my children welcomed, that I did all the housework, the washing and ironing, and even scrubbed the floors to save hiring a negro. But when school was out in May, my people sent us back to Mr. Fenton.