Everybody''s Autobiography

  And so we began to know what every one did who did anything. I often have said that it is a puzzle to me that a boy just out of school goes into his father’s office and they give him a lot of papers and nobody gave him papers before and he seems to know what to do with them.

  We asked Mike what he did because he was supposed to be managing a branch line and they were to do some new work on it. Where do you get your men we asked him. Oh you lean on the wall and first one and then more come, he said. That is the way they did then. We then used to be puzzled because he said he was very good at making up time-tables and we knew he never could do arithmetic, we always used to have to do percentage for him and division and addition and subtraction but he was very good at making up very complicated time-tables so everybody said. And then sometimes he came home and he was pretty sick. He said that was because they wanted to have a new franchise and he had to meet the men who could give it to them. No one in the family ever liked drinking. They smoked very good cigars very good cigars and they knew a lot about tobacco as was the habit in California but they never did care for drinking. And so we were interested in what they did, but all we knew was that Mike would be pretty sick and did not care much about anything then. But what we liked most Leo and I was to go and call for him at his office. We had by that time been given an allowance for spending, but naturally we bought books with it, we always bought books with it, I bought a Shelley in green and Morocco binding and we bought an illustrated set of Thackeray and we had a simple book plate made and when we went to call for Mike in the evening when we had gone to the city as everybody in Oakland going over to San Francisco called San Francisco we never had any more money, Mike would always sigh but he liked to have us with him and so he would take us out to dinner but before that we would sit and watch him disciplining.

  Any gripman or conductor who had done anything he should not do would be sent in to see him. Mike who never knew what to say unless he was really angry and then would say if this kind of thing goes on I will throw up the whole damn business, used to stand with his head down, the man would go on and Mike his face very solemn would stand with his head down and then would mutter something. And we in the background knowing what Mike was feeling were thoroughly enjoying the situation. The men dreaded being sent in to Mike because he never said anything and only looked solemn.

  Then he would take us out to dinner, and San Francisco was a nice place in those days to be taken out to dinner by a brother.

  And it all went on until one spring or summer.

  Then one morning we could not wake up our father. Leo climbed in by the window and called out to us that he was dead in his bed and he was.

  Then we stayed where we were a little longer and then we moved to San Francisco. Mike was our guardian as Leo and I were minors and I remember going to a court for the only time I was ever in one, to say that we would have him.

  It was a funny place it all seemed to have so much raw wood in it the floors and the walls and all sorts of things in it, and we were in and we were out and that was all there was to it.

  Then our life without a father began a very pleasant one.

  I have been thinking a lot about fathers any kind of fathers.

  After all civilization has only lasted about five thousand years and five thousand is an awfully small number to see anywhere now. This is the epoch of big figures and five thousand is not much of a one.

  And fathers come up and fathers go down. That is natural enough when nobody has had fathers they begin to long for them and then when everybody has had fathers they begin to long to do without them. Sometimes barons and dukes are fathers and then kings come to be fathers and churchmen come to be fathers and then comes a period like the eighteenth century a nice period when everybody has had enough of anybody being a father to them and then gradually capitalists and trade unionists become fathers and which goes on to communists and dictators, just now everybody has a father, perhaps the twenty-first century like the eighteenth century will be a nice time when everybody forgets to be a father or to have been one. The Jews and they come into this because they are very much given to having a father and to being one and they are very much given not to want a father and not to have one, and they are an epitome of all this that is happening the concentration of fathering to the perhaps there not being one.

  Well anyway, we had a time with only a brother not a father, and a father as Mike later so well explained to me is different after all he is a father.

  Soon we left East Oakland and went to live in San Francisco. We went to live on Turk Street, of course at that time everybody lived in a house alone, they still do pretty much in America, and it was a pleasure to see all those wooden houses a wonderful pleasure but all that will come later.

  We did move in all of us together and once we all were tired of unpacking and Mike had been left alone in the cellar and we all had commenced eating and Mike came up in the dining room and he was furious with every one and he said if this sort of thing was going to go on he would throw up the whole damn business. Whenever he said that we all surrounded him to placate him. Anything but that he should throw up the whole damn business. He used to make nice little jokes too that pleased us and Leo and I always liked giving him a book to read, he never read any book except one that we gave him and that he always read from the beginning to the ending. He always had these pleasant little ways he still has them.

  One night there was a big fire one of those nice American fires that have so many horses and firemen to attend them and Mike very frightened came up to see that we were all safe and none of us were awake and he was furious with us because none of us had heard anything and he was the only one awake. And then one night the night-watchman woke us up because some one had left the front parlor window wide open, and he had to go down and close it to please the watchman not that it made any difference to any of us but Mike said we had to please the watchman. We lived like this for a year or more. I know I was most awfully shocked when Mike brought home my father’s business books and Leo and I went through them with him. There were so many debts it was frightening, and then I found out that profit and loss is always loss, that did not worry us as much as there being estate debts, but Mike explained that this always happened in a business and it was all right, because we always had a habit in the family never to owe anybody any money.

  I have been writing a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post about money and what is money. And it is awfully funny about money. I am sure that there is no difference between men and animals except the power to count and if you count you do count money. Just now nobody counts in any small numbers such as thousands and millions they have to go very much higher, but then any counting was counting and large sums were just beginning. They really did begin first with England in the Napoleonic wars and later with us and the Civil war and now they are not overwhelming because the imagination has gotten used to them which is natural enough. After all there is one one one and there are the stars’ light traveling and anything else there can be. Do not forget that everything is as it is even if it is. All right we lived in San Francisco more than a year. During that time we sometimes had visitors from the East, that is relatives and cousins. Naturally we had not known them but they came to see us. The first one that came was another Simon Stein quite another one. He was a gentle Simon Stein and a quiet one and he said nothing that is to say he did not say much of anything and that evening when he left my brother Simon went with him to the train and when Simon came back he said that Simon Stein had said to him thank you for seeing me to the train when you come to Baltimore I will be sure to do that for you. And we all laughed and we all laughed louder and Simon said he thought all the way home that there was something funny about Simon Stein when he said good-bye to him.

  Later another one this time not a Simon but a Hattie came and she had just been married and her husband was a big man. They talked more than Simon Stein had and nobody went with them to the train.

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; These were all on my father’s side of the family those on my mother’s side naturally never came.

  Anybody can think a lot about money. It is funny about money, there are such different ways of counting money, but everybody anybody is counting and is counting money. The Keysers my mother’s people and the Steins my father’s people had very different ways of counting money. So have we all.

  When I was at Radcliffe I was to pass my entrance examinations after I had been there some years. I had left the high school young and I had never learned French and German having had it and forgotten it and I knew a lot but still there were some examinations that knowing a lot did not help advanced Latin was one and so Margaret Lewis a graduate student was to teach me enough to get through. We worked together and I was to pay her at the end of the month. I had paid her and then one month I had spent all my month’s money in going to the opera and so I said to her do you mind if I do not pay you as I have not got any money. She said no reflectively and then she said what do you mean when you say you have no money, Oh I said I mean I have spent my month’s money and I haven’t any. Well she said reflectively your father and mother are dead you have your own money haven’t you. Yes I said. Well then she said you have the money to pay me now I do not need it but you have it so you must not say you haven’t got it. Yes I said but you see I cannot use that because that is what I have not got I only have a month’s money, yes she said but you see those who earn money have not got it but then when they have not got it they have not got it. I was much surprised and I never forgot it. Now I am not so much surprised because after all an income is an income whether you earn it or whether you have it and I was right and she was right about it. Sometimes everybody wonders whether there is going to be one kind of income or another kind. Jessie Whitehead used to say during the war, after the war there is not going to be any more cream to put on strawberries and when I am an old lady I will tell my grandchildren there used when you ate strawberries to be something called cream and I will describe it to them and they will marvel at it. Anyway there does seem to be a great deal of cream all the same, more cream than ever one might say, and so Jessie Whitehead cannot tell her grandchildren about the wonderful thing called cream which they have never seen just as Picasso cannot listen to his old friends sitting around with their wooden legs telling about their war campaigns. Jo Davidson says that what he wants is everybody to have an income then nobody will worry about anything, well anyway an income if it does not go away is very comforting and does not need so much counting as other kinds of counting. Afterwards while I was still at college I did realize that my uncles and cousins they were richer than we were and they knew less about everything they did not realize that anybody needed to be paid right away, they always paid of course but they did not realize that waiting was complicating. But now what happens, well now nothing happens, there are a great many more who have an income, but even so counting is really pleasant when there is something to count.

  Naturally Leo and I spent all the money we had on books, I still like that only now I buy only the cheapest detective and adventure stories and then I bought the most expensive history and poetry and literature. As I say incomes are incomes and counting is counting and reading is reading. Why not.

  And so our life in California came to an end and we left that is Leo and I left and my sister left. Mike and Simon stayed on.

  Years before Leo and I were to go East with my mother. I was about nine then and he eleven. We bought as many books as we could to take along. We bought Jules Verne lots of them and then we did not go my mother went but we did not go but we had already bought the books to read in traveling. There was the Cryptogram and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Children of Captain Grant we had already had that in German, we seemed to have Jules Verne in everything except in French of course I only read him in English and the English at the North Pole and The Mysterious Island we had bought all these for traveling and Around the World in Eighty Days. You can read a book over and over again until you remember everything and even then you can read it over again if you begin at the beginning. That is very important about reading a book over again you must really begin at the beginning. In that way you can read it over and over again.

  I do not know why we did not go East with my mother, I suppose there was something instead we went to Marysville and stayed with the relations of a governess we had then. In The Making of Americans I have told about all the governesses we had and this was the one who finally married a baker. I have written a very good description of her. Marysville was hot and there were mosquitoes and the beds were made of feathers and there were lots of animals. Anyway we came home in the autumn, and when my mother came back she was never well again. Mike was at that time in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University and he wanted to marry some one there and my mother wanted this to happen she liked anything to happen, but it did not happen and it was then that Mike wrote the poem that Leo and I found and it said that he always had looked at a plot of grass and it had been a plot of grass to him and then he met the one he loved and then when he looked at the plot of grass there were birds and butterflies on the plot of grass and before that there never had been. That was what love was. Then we also found letters he had written or she had and they consisted of a great deal of Latin and hopes of Latin. We enjoyed finding them. This was after Mike came back from the East and he had come out with the G. A. R. celebration, you had cheap tickets if you belonged to that organization. Naturally Mike was much too young for that but he grew a beard to make him look like one. Perhaps he had the right as the son of one, or his uncles may have been of them although as a matter of fact the one who went all through the war fought on the Southern side. My mother used to tell us stories of Baltimore and the Northern soldiers being stoned as they passed from one station to the other you always had to change in Baltimore. The Civil war seems far away now but then it seemed quite near. If your grandfather was an oldish man when your mother was born and you are the youngest of a number of children it is extraordinary how few generations can cover the history of civilization. Everything is as exciting as it can be but not that.

  Any time is the time to make a poem. The snow and sun below.

  When they came to see us the relations, from New York and Baltimore and they said they loved to read we were always surprised that they had not read anything. It did not worry us but it surprised us. Nothing about them worried us and that was all about them that surprised us. Really nothing was very surprising or worrying just then. We had no parents and each one of us was where each one was. That was what we were doing.

  We all stayed in San Francisco for a year and then we all went somewhere. Bertha and I went to Baltimore and Leo went to Harvard. Mike stayed in San Francisco and so did Simon. Mike said Simon could be a gripman on any car except one of the lines that belonged to their system and Simon was one for years on the California street line, he finally only drove on Sundays and he was even so big he could hardly stand in between where he had to stand and his pockets were always full of candy for any one and cigars for any one and he went on until the fire and after that he gave it up and went fishing, but Mike had also left San Francisco by then he was in Europe then and so Simon was the only one left in California.

  When we left San Francisco for Baltimore we left Mike all alone Simon did not count and Mike was alone, later he married but at that time he was alone and he had to save everything for all of us and he did it but he never knew quite how he did it.

  Street railroads do not exist any more they have taken the last one off of Paris but then they did exist and we all used them, there was no other way to go up and down except to walk and in San Francisco and everywhere distances were too long to always walk and horses were slow and street railways were quicker. To be sure street railways once were drawn by horses but except in Baltimore and many other places that was almost over. Anyway in San Francisco there always had been street railways. Then there was the dummy, the dummy had four seats
in front almost like a cow catcher and Alice Toklas likes the story of when she and three others were together they were sitting on the front of the dummy, the dummy gave a jerk, it often did, and Ada said I almost fell off the dummy, who almost fell off the dummy said the other three, I almost fell off the dummy said Ada. Alice Toklas still says and who almost fell off the dummy.

  Well anyway, when my father came to California he had the money that he had made with his brother in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that is how we all happened to be born there, and then when the sisters-in-law were no longer able to get along together, one brother went to New York and we all went to Europe. My father was interested in everything and when we all came back from Europe we all went out to California. There my father waited a considerable while before he was interested in anything and then he became interested in street railroading. There were at that time several systems which sometimes transferred to another one but each one was by itself and one was called the Union, that was the one that my father came finally to become the vice-president and of course we all heard all about everything the way anybody does without listening, the word franchise was a common word.

  Then my father was dead and Mike was doing something, we used to go to see him do it and we knew George Leroy was to help him. George Leroy was the French brother who was not a wicked Frenchman like his brother Eugene. At any rate he was a large and quiet Frenchman and he used to come and sit and neither he nor Mike said anything. That was much later after everything was done that I saw them sitting that was after Mike was married and everything had been done and I came from the East to California to visit them.

  After we went away Mike’s troubles really began.

  My father had been one of the early ones to believe in consolidation and he had worked out a complete system for the street railroads of San Francisco. But he was a man who frightened any one because he was too impatient to finish what was not yet begun. And so he was vice-president of a small part of the system of San Francisco street railroads. When he was dead naturally what was small was still smaller and everything else was getting bigger. Mike who like his mother’s family dislikes responsibility and dislikes business it makes him nervous when anything has to be done knew that it had to be done. Anybody wants to do what Mike wants them to do and so everybody did but what could they do. How it was done nobody ever knew. Mike’s own statement was that he knew if it was not done he had us all on his hands because none of us could earn anything not even Simon enough to live on and something had to be done and so although the Southern Pacific street railroads could have had the Mission line for nothing they took it on on an equal footing. Mike persuaded them. Then afterwards when they realized what had been done they were so impressed by him that they made him manager of the whole system and that was frightful for him because it does make him nervous to decide anything besides he likes to be very busy just arranging any little thing, but he was manager for two years and then he decided to either go to Paris or to the country and by that time he did come. When it was all done he said now at last it was satisfactory, we had enough to live on if we lived very quietly and we all did live very quietly until the war began, other things have happened since but we did live very very quietly until the war began.