Fish On Friday

Mrs. Boggiano, née Katie Zdrojefska, was born at Moulmoon on the Slwotz River in Latvia. My maps do not locate the river or the town, but this is not surprising. Her parents were Poles and had slipped up into the Latvic (then Lettonic) peninsula before Katie was born, and they carried, as is the custom, old and familiar names to strange places. “Slwotz” may be a corruption of “Slutsk,” which is a real river near the Pinsk Marshes in West Poland, where Katie’s people came from. I have little skill at geography and less at genealogy, so this short statement of the lady’s antecedents will have to suffice. The point to remember is that she is a Christian peasant, born and bred in a mysteriously small nation of Northern Europe; and that she left it and came to America.

Mrs. Boggiano arrived in this country at the age of twelve, the spring before the Great War. Her sister, Ralolla Zdrojefska, had emigrated ten years previously and had already married Zingamesh Psduhishwish. (I am weak on invertebrate names, but this approximates it, and besides it sounds like a wave on the Baltic Sea, and may give this story a little local color in case I get courage to use it again.) Katie lived with her sister for a few years, and then hired out as second laundry-girl to the Elkinses, a well-favored family of these parts, who live in a mansion with sixteen servants and are very unhappy.

Romances are always interesting, so I shall sketch Katie’s briefly. She was very beautiful, and is so to this day. I have a theory that expressions and not features are beautiful, and that lovely thoughts make a lovely face; but if you hold an opposite opinion, I might mention that her eyes are Baltic blue (a blue with a difference), her hair is silky and honey-colored, and I feel sure a lady novelist expert at facial descriptions would produce a long paragraph in praise of her neck and nose; there would be a page on her profile and a chapter on her chin.

The eldest Elkins daughter was a student of art, and often called Katie from the laundry, draped her in some outlandish fashion, and made her pose for a picture. One summer afternoon she was put on display before a crowd of esthetic visitors who had motored out to a house party. She was ordered to appear in the garden and wait beside the fountain, wearing her striped skirt, her checkered waist, her red shawl, and her mother’s gold loops in her ears.

Poor Katie, utterly bewildered, twisted her fingers nervously during this ordeal and, like a frightened bird, tried many times to run away. The guests gathered about and discussed her as they would a vase or a rug. It was all very clever and very cruel. The gentlemen of the party called her “interesting” (a delicately ill-mannered expression, indicating no sense of verbal discrimination, and applicable equally to an archangel or an alligator); while the ladies agreed she was a “type,” — which is a word employed by ugly débutantes in order to designate and belittle the good-looking daughters of the poor.

And then it happened. One afternoon in summer, when Katie and the first laundry-girl, who was also Polish, were hanging the last of a heavy washing on the dry-lines in the trellised enclosure south of the big mansion, a little pink-eyed rabbit darted under the hedge. Katie, forgetting her dignity as second laundry-girl, and remembering only that she had just turned sixteen, chased the rabbit. As it started to cross the road, there happened to be strolling home from work one Tommaso Boggiano, a railroad blacksmith, tired, sooty, and lonely. The dark eyes of Italy met the light blue eyes of Latvia. Tommaso caught the rabbit. And the Elkinses were out a second laundry-girl.

Mrs. Boggiano at the age of twenty-six has been married ten years and is the mother of six children. It is amazing how Providence sees to it that the simple of heart reproduce their kind in great abundance. Nature is constantly at work sloughing off its skeptics and sophisticates by sterility or self-destruction, and is continually replenishing the world with those who have a sense of reverence and a sense of humor. It is good that this is so. It is good that the meek possess the land.

Most young girls find marriage a problem, and are not always happy after they are wedded. The reason is because during the feverish days of courtship they fail to remember that incompatibility of temperament is the normal condition between the sexes, and there can be no love without discipline and no fidelity without self-sacrifice. Mrs. Boggiano solved this problem by marrying a man ten years her senior, different to her in all his sensibilities, indeed, whose very language she did not understand. It would be true to say that she never fell in love with him. Rather, she had always been loving something like him, something innocent, deficient and unfulfilled, that needed the richness of her nature to establish it and make it contented. It was in her quest of a little pink-eyed rabbit that she ran into a dark-eyed man.

Boggiano is a leathery little fellow with close-cropped hair, large ears, a parabolic nose, and excellent teeth. His face in repose is decidedly homely, and is seldom well-washed, but, due to the influence of a ready and mischievous smile (much more than to soap and water) it achieves a certain brightness of texture and harmony of design, and could at moments be called handsome. In his working clothes he looks not only presentable, but even distinguished. Dressed up he becomes a complete bumpkin. He has a ravenous appetite, has a flair for poultry, and is good at gardening. He is especially skillful at chores, chopping wood, raking leaves and fixing fences, and always at his work he whistles and sings beautifully. He is not so much Katie’s companion as her complement — for the Italians are gay and the Poles sad. And by his dramatics, tricks and practical jokes he safeguards her sanity and her sense of the ridiculous. She calls him in Polish (though I do not know the word for it) her “private comedian.”

He looks so funny when he crawls into a boiled shirt on Holy Name Sunday and she helps him to fasten in the gold buttons. He looks so funny with lather on his mustache when he shaves. He looks so funny when, with clownish gallantry, he catches her by the hand and entreats her to waltz with him in the pantry. Katie wouldn’t exchange him for any other husband in the world. He is too enjoyable and, above all, too uninvolved. He gets angry, but never moody. He sometimes uses profanity, but even in his greatest temper would not harm a kitten. He worships her little ones, takes them up tenderly when they cry, and sings them to sleep with operatic airs. Day by day he stares contemplatively at this lovely, blue-eyed creature from the North, whom he wooed with a few words of broken English — all of it ungrammatical and most of it slang — and who, for some sweet, secret reason she has never disclosed, was willing to become his possession, wash his clothes, cook his meals, and bear his children.

I sometimes think mothers get more pity than they require. There is much talk lately about how difficult it is to bear a child, and too little talk about how nice it is to have one. Someone should put a stop to the considerable screaming being done by unmarried lecturers in the throes of giving birth to imaginary children on public platforms. Motherhood is never honored by excessive talk about the heroics of pregnancy. If babies were not worth the pains and confinements they cause, there would not have been a billion of them born in the last hundred years. It is true they have come mostly from black, yellow and brown women and our western civilization is dwindling. But it is nice to know that the heroine of this story, imported to our shores in pigtails at the age of twelve, has been responsible for the complexions of six little snow-white Americans. In this way our country is kept populated with a few Caucasians, and the Constitution goes on.

Katie Zdrojefska has never heard the reasons advanced for the restriction of families, and would probably not comprehend them if they were explained to her. She knows it is hard enough to be poor and have children. She would think it unbearable to be poor and have none. Fidelity to nature’s laws has left her will unhampered by hesitancies, inhibitions and phobias. Her body has become the instrument of a pure spirit able to melt every inch of it and make it maternal. Her fruitfulness has never been outraged by drugstore deviltries, and so there are no cross-purposes in her nerves needing to be untangled by a psychiatrist. Hither and thither she moves at her nursery tasks, bothered but not bored, tired but never in a tantrum, her children’s chiefest plaything, continually tugged at by the apron strings. It is her way of learning that life is very good and God is very wonderful — God who breathed on the little make-believe daughter she used to fondle in far-off Latvia, and turned it in this land of exile into a living doll: her namesake, now seven years old; now able after a brief coaching to arrange the kitchen table for supper, beautified with her mother’s eyes, shadowed with her light brown hair, vibrant with the identical shift of her shoulders, the turn of her head, as she utters a patient and imitative sigh when the cups run short, or the sugar bowl is discovered hiding behind the bread tin.

It must be obvious that this unlettered Polish woman is a splendidly civilized person and a most valuable member of society. She is a minimum of annoyance to her neighbors and a minimum of expense to the state. No high-salaried social scientist is required to adjust her to the simple problem of living. And if intelligence is — as it is — half a moral virtue, there need be no hesitancy in calling her highly intelligent. Her mind touches the realities of life by swift intuitions and certitudes. Unlike her psychic sisters of the INTELLIGENTSIA, she does her thinking for herself. It is not done for her by nervous philosophers, diseased dramatists, sullen poets, and melancholy writers of fiction, whose purposes are anti-social and whose friendships are unwholesome. Her tradition is that of the Christian peasant, the soundest of all metaphysicians, and, under the influence of Divine grace, the profoundest of all mystics . . .

It is Springtime. The birds are twittering in the trees outside my window. My room becomes stuffy. Indoors becomes intolerable. So I decide to cajole a much-prized walking companion into a jaunt on the highway.

We march merrily along, and I am cheered by the sweet afternoon air, the brightness of the fields and the sky, and the unfailing gaiety of the drôle de corps who treks the hills along with me.

A quarter of a mile down the road we pass the cottage where the Boggianos live. Three of the little ones: Tommy, Catherine, and Anna Maria, are playing in the yard. They run to the fence to hail us as we pass.

The smoke curls at the chimney top. The little pigs grunt in the sty. The mother hen scratches for her brood under the hay wagon. Soon, Mrs. Boggiano appears in the doorway. She wears a faded housedress, old shoes, and no stockings. Her hair is parted straight in the middle and bound with an elastic band behind her head. Her forehead is covered with perspiration and with steam from the stew pot, boiling on the stove. Her arms are bare to the elbow, and there is a bad grease burn on her right forearm. She looks a bit fatigued (Boggiano says the new baby is only one month away), but there is, as ever, in her clear blue eyes aloofness, serenity, purity and calm. She beams with delight when she sees us talking to the children, and curtseys in the manner of a princess. And half in Polish, half in English, she greets us with a prayer: “May Jesus bless you, Reverend Fathers; and may the Blessed Mother be your protection at all times.”

“Hello, Mrs. Boggiano!” we answer in the cold, clumsy manner of Americans . . . but down in our hearts we are saying: “And may Jesus love you and bless you too. And may Our Lady keep you forever in the blue shadow of her mantle, Katie Zdrojefska, from Moulmoon, on the Slwotz River, in Latvia!”