Proud Flesh by William Humphrey Page A

the value of money, her sons began paying for their keep; as their earnings rose so did their room and board. The house had the atmosphere of the meanest boardinghouse. A light left burning in an empty room or a faucet found dripping, a bar of soap left to melt on a wet dish could curdle the family atmosphere for an entire day.
    Hazel had made herself the family’s unfavorite. Her first spoken sentence had been a complaint. She was like a music box: the same tune every time she opened up. She did not quarrel, did not stand up for her rights, as members of a large family all must, and after a while she learned not even to assert them; she just looked done out of them, put-upon, orphaned. And she had a genius for contriving to be left out. It was she for whom at the last minute there was no room in the car. If at dinner there was one gristly or overdone or underdone portion of the meat Hazel got it, and declined all offers to exchange. The worm in the salad, the pebble in the peas, Hazel bit on them. In everything she made herself her sisters’ unwanted drudge and second-fiddle. If originally this Cinderella manner of hers had been meant, consciously or unconsciously, to win affection and concessions, it had long ago become an end in itself. She found more enjoyment in being wronged than she found in having her wrongs righted. As her mother once said, to err is human, to be forgiven by Hazel is divine.
    They came now in their ancient Dodge, she at the wheel, sacrificing the dilapidated old conveyance in her double haste—anxious for her mother but with her nose in the wind, scenting her mother’s will. Leaving her husband outside with the men, she hurried into the house. And her brothers turned back to face their neighbors expressionless. They stuck together. She was one of theirs. And theirs was a clannishness remarkable even in a place noted for clannishness.
    Next came Lois, alone, in the brave, too brave, desperately gay weeds of her grass-widowhood, a fluffy little meringue of a hat, and in that new red convertible bought to celebrate her divorce decree which made of her a show like a float in a parade or like the entire navy of, say, Bolivia, and she its sole admiral. Lois asked the same questions everyone asked, as to what had been done for Ma, contriving somehow to suggest that nothing could have been done right in her absence. A chronic nag with a small insistent voice like a mosquito’s, tricked by life and unforgiving, she lived in a state of unflagging resentment which even her divorce, that condition for which she had lived as a life-term prisoner lives for a parole, had failed to assuage.
    Lois had married latest of all the sisters, at an age when already she had been consigned to be the family’s one old maid, already an aunt many times over by then and seemingly an aunt by nature and disposition, already by that time her mother’s principal confidante and destined by general supposition to be the companion of Ma’s widowed years. She had married after two weeks’ acquaintance a good-natured, unambitious, live-and-let-live boy some years her junior with an hereditary tendency to drink and dominoes. Two weeks later she presented for her mother’s signature the bill of annulment. To her mother, whose creed was that marriage was a vow as unalterable as a nun’s. One month later she stood for the second time before the same justice of the peace with the same slightly tipsy bridegroom and went through the same spiel as before, this time making a cold furious mental reservation upon every word uttered, promising herself neither to love, honor nor obey him but to make his life a daily bed of nails, not till death did them part, but until a day (the exact date she would know some eight months hence) sometime in March of 1962, the child’s eighteenth birthday—unless she (the child, that is; for Lois was certain it would be a girl: that too would be a part of her bad