Collected Stories by T.E.D. Klein

Author:T.E.D. Klein [Klein, T.E.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

The Little Mother

IN MY YOUTH there was a family that lived up Gardiner’s Hill in Cork called Twomey. It consisted of father, mother, and three pretty daughters, Joan, Kitty, and May. The father was a small builder, honest, hard-working, unbusinesslike, and greatly esteemed. The mother was a real beauty, tall, attractive, and sentimental, who wept profusely over the wrongs of Ireland, romantic love, and the sufferings of the poor. At least once a day Mick Twomey, coming in and finding a beggar eating his dinner on a chair outside the front door, or warming himself in the kitchen over the fire, denounced her imbecility, but in secret he adored her, and told his daughters that there wasn’t a woman in the world like her.

The girls were as wild as they make them; they were spoiled; there was no doubt of that. May, being only thirteen, couldn’t be really wild, but there was something about her gentle smile and insinuating air which indicated that this was only a pleasure deferred. Joan, the eldest, had a broad, humorous face, an excitable manner, and a great flow of gab. Kitty, the second girl, was an untidy, emotional sort, who took more after her mother than the others and was her father’s pet. Mrs. Twomey couldn’t control them. She would fly into a wild rage against one of them, and threaten to tell their father, and then remember an identical occasion in her own girlhood and laugh at her own naughtiness and her dead mother’s fury till, the immediate occasion of her emotion forgotten, she went about the house singing sentimental songs like “Can You Recall that Night in June?”

She shamelessly searched their rooms and handbags for love-letters, ostensibly because it was her duty, but really because they reminded her of the letters she had received herself when she was a girl and of the writers, now married, scattered or dead. She was usually so enchanted by them that she never bothered to inquire whether or not the writers were suitable companions for her daughters. She tried to read some of them to her husband, not realizing that all men hated to be reminded of their adolescent follies. “For God’s sake, don’t be encouraging them in that sort of nonsense!” he snapped. But what was nonsense to him was the breath of life to Mrs. Twomey. She loved it on Sunday evenings when the gas was lit in the little front room, and the oil lamp was placed in the middle of the big round table to give light to the piano, and the girls’ friends dropped in for a cup of tea and a singsong. She hung on there till she couldn’t decently do so any longer, beaming and asking in stage whispers: “What do you think of Dick Gordon? People say he’s not steady, but there’s something very manly about him.”

Naturally, Dick Gordon, Joan’s boy, was the one whose letters she appreciated the most. He was tall and handsome and bony, with

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