The American: A Middle Western Legend by Howard Fast Page B

want eggs or hotcakes?” “I want hotcakes,” he nodded firmly. “Well, I just don’t know if we have honey.” “Then butter. Butter is just as good. My goodness, does having hotcakes depend on honey? I remember hotcakes when honey was a dream. Believe me, a dream.” “All right,” she said. “Butter. I got some fresh butter yesterday.”
    He took his little silver scissors and went to the mirror, to see whether his mustache or beard needed trimming today. A hair here or a hair there made all the difference in the world. Looking at his reflection, he was pleased, for on top of the train of memory, it was nice to see this dignified and not uncomely jurist of forty years. The close-clipped beard and mustache gave his face dignity, lessened the prow of his chin, yet did not age him as beards age some men. The mustache was carefully groomed to cover his harelip, and it was surprising what a difference that made in the whole aspect of his face. As a matter of fact, men who knew him long and fairly intimately were completely unaware of his defect, and of late he had even ceased to allow it to be a weight on his own mind. His face had become leaner, and that too helped. A good barber trained his unruly shock of hair to fold back over his fine brow, and he had a habit of so carrying his head as to give that clean, well-shaped brow its fullest effect. All in all, his appearance was not anything he would have to resist, anything to hold him back; it is true that he was not as tall as he would have preferred, but he had long ago formed a theory that small men fight better.
    Trimming his mustache and beard, observing himself, half detachedly, the way men do in their morning mirror, he decided that he had made the best of a poor face, very much the best of it, even to the extent of winning the girl he wanted. That thought pushed away the last unpleasant connotations of the day, and he nodded agreement at his reflection. He had a penchant for storytelling, and some day he would write down the tale of his love and courtship. Actually, it was as good as those romances people are paid to write.
    It was another ugly-duckling tale. Long, long ago, when he had held his first teaching job in Ohio, he fell in love with a girl named Emma Ford. Just to think of what he was then could explain why the girl’s family would have nothing of him; but he always felt the girl cared for him, and his boyhood love was something he sought along with the more solid values men put store in. The girl was a dream that walked with him; she was part of loneliness; she was part of the indescribable ache when he lay on his back on the hard ground and looked at the stars. This was not to say that he had loved only one woman; women, to him, were beautiful, to be wanted, to be desired; but there were many women and only one who inhabited that time when he had nothing and wanted all. So it was not surprising that at the age of thirty, with a future, some property, and certainly some standing in the world, he had returned and asked for her hand again.
    And she took him. This tall, beautiful, well-educated girl took him, Pete Altgeld, the disinherited, the self-made. Some might be cynical about this, but he couldn’t be; he knew her better than any of them. He had her, in the morning, in the daytime, at night. This was the romance that life gives to only a few, and life had given it to him.
    It was no wonder that looking at his face in the mirror, snipping a hair here, a hair there, he was able to forget that today was sure to be profoundly disturbing, and take comfort from the man who had married the woman, Emma Ford. He had a fine wife, and it was a boyhood love, the best love, the most lasting. When other men looked at her, casually at first, and then more intently, he felt the fierce pride of possession. Shouldn’t a man stand on the firm foundation of his own things? Here he was in his own house, in this fine