Free The Passing Bells by Phillip Rock Page B

Daddy.”
    â€œOh, do you?” he snorted, biting the tip off his cigar and propelling the fragment toward a shiny brass cuspidor. “Well, my girl, it’s normal for a man to want kids—his own kids or grandkids. Natural fact that, ask anybody.”
    â€œI wish I’d been born a boy.” She sighed. “It would have made everything so much simpler.”
    He came up behind her and rubbed the side of his hand against her neck. “Yes, Foxe and son right from the start. Only thing, see. He would ’ave looked like me instead of his mother. I would ’ave ’ad a short, ugly, redheaded nipper instead of a bloomin’ ravin’ beauty of a girl.”
    She turned with a smile and put her arms around him, hugging him, inhaling his scent of fine woolens and good tobacco.
    â€œYou’re a dear. I’ll give you scads of little nippers one day, Daddy. I promise.”
    â€œI’ve never doubted it, but I wish you’d hurry up and get started.”
    â€œI have plans,” she said quietly. “Really quite wonderful plans.”
    Hanna gave some thought to her nephew as a maid brushed and combed her hair for her.
    â€œWould her ladyship like it swept up this morning?” the maid asked. “With a few curls on the sides?”
    â€œI think so, Rose . . . yes, the way you did it the other day.”
    â€œVery well, your ladyship. I’ll just heat up the iron.”
    The cablegram, sent from New York, was in the center of her desk: W ILL ARRIVE C UNARD SS L ACONIA DOCKING S OUTHAMPTON F RIDAY J UNE 12 STOP E AGERLY AWAITING SEEING YOU AGAIN REGARDS TO ALL M ARTIN R ILKE.
    Just thinking of the wire made her smile. It was so American. So filled with uninhibited eagerness and friendliness, a pat on the back and the big hello—the Chicago manner. Give my regards to all. Only a midwesterner would cherish such presumptions toward people he had never met, nor even corresponded with, simply because they were family. She could understand his attitude, because although she had left Chicago at the age of nineteen, to return there only once for the briefest stay, she had never lost her awareness of American attitudes. It would have seemed perfectly natural and right for him to send such a wire—“give my regards to all”—to Uncle Tony, cousins Charles, Alexandra, and William. Indeed, it would have seemed wrong, in his mind, not to do so. The unfortunate fact was that her husband and her children would have been bewildered had she passed on such sentiments to them. She had merely said, after receiving the wire, “My nephew will be arriving on the twelfth. He is looking forward to meeting all of you.” That, of course, was understandable. They were, in a mild fashion, looking forward to meeting him. (William, not having been home and knowing nothing about it, was excluded.) She had told them two months before that Martin would be coming to England, to stay for a week or two before traveling on to France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, so that the announcement of a specific time and place of arrival had come as no surprise.
    â€œIs he, now?” her husband had said. “So soon. Well, we shall have to send Ross down to the docks to pick him up . . . and one of the footmen to help with the luggage.”
    â€œI think it would be nicer if Charles went also.”
    â€œYes, quite so, my dear, by all means.”
    Charles had shown a certain reluctance: “It’s not as though I knew the chap, Mother. . . .” But her will had prevailed.
    â€œI just hope to heaven he’s not like that other Rilke who descended on us last year.”
    â€œNo, dear,” she had said, “I’m sure that he isn’t. He’s my brother William’s son. You remember my telling you about him.”
    Charles had nodded in the affirmative, but she doubted whether he remembered very much of what she had told him in bits