“You know,” Charley said to me once, “you missed your vocation. You should have been a playground director or worked for the YMCA. I never saw anybody take to kids so. The noise doesn’t bother you. That’s what bothers me.” In the evenings he always looked tired.

I said, “I think parents should spend more time with their kids.”

“How can they help it?” Fay said. “Good god, the kids are underfoot all the time. Kids grow up better if adults don’t interfere with them too much. They should be let alone.” She was glad to have me babysit and play with the girls, but she did not approve of my mixing into the continual quarrels that the girls had with each other. She had al ways simply let them fight it out, but I soon saw that the older girl, being more advanced intellectually and much heavier physically, always won. It was not fair, and I felt required to step in.

“The only way kids can learn what’s justice is if adults teach them,” I said to Fay.

“What do you know about justice?” Fay said. “Here you are up here in my house freeloading. How’d you get up here anyhow?” She glared at me with that half-serious, half-joking exasperation that I was familiar with; she had this way of mixing a serious statement in with irony so that it was never possible to tell how seriously she meant what she said. “Who brought you here?” she demanded.

In my own mind I had no guilt. I was giving back plenty for what I took; I did a great deal of Fay’s housework for her, and by babysitting I made it possible for them to save a lot of money. On an average, baby-sitting alone had run them three dollars a night, and over a period of a month this sometimes added up to sixty or seventy dollars. All these figures I recorded in my notebooks; I calculated how much I cost them and how much I saved them. The only real cost that I added to their budget was that of food. But I was not eating sixty dollars worth of food a month, so by baby-sitting alone I earned my keep. I didn’t add appreciably to the heating bills, on the water, although of course I did bathe and wash, and my clothes had to be put into the automatic washer. And I went around turning off lights not in use, and lowering thermostats when people left rooms, so in my estimation—such a thing is admittedly very hard to estimate—I actually saved them money on their utility bills. And by riding the horse I prolonged his life, since, not being ridden, he was getting overly fat, which put an unnatural strain on his heart.

More than anything else, however, and something that could not be calculated in dollars and cents, I improved the atmosphere regarding the children. In me they had someone who cared about them, who enjoyed playing with them and listening to them and giving them affection—I did not consider it a duty or a chore. I took them on long walks, bought them bubble gum at the store, watched “Gunsmoke” with them on tv, cleaned up their rooms…

And that’s another thing: by doing heavy household work such as scrubbing the floors I made it possible for Fay to let Mrs. Mendini, her cleaning woman, go. Consider that Mrs. Mendini’s presence had always annoyed Fay; she felt that Mrs. Mendini was listening to everything anybody said, and Fay had always liked privacy. That was one of her major motives for desiring a large house isolated in the country.

One Saturday afternoon when Fay had gone into San Rafael to shop, and the two girls were over at Edith Keever’s place playing with her children, Charley started talking to me out in the field by the duck pen. He had been running a new pipe to the ducks’ water trough.

“Doesn’t it bother you to do housework?” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“I don’t think a man should do that kind of stuff,” he said. Later on he said, “I don’t think the girls should see a man doing it either. It gives them the idea a man can be bossed around by a woman.”

To that, I said nothing; I could think of nothing pertinent.

Charley said, “She can’t get me to do her god damn errands.”

“I see,” I said politely.

“A man has to keep his self-respect,” Charley said. “Doing housework robs him of his masculinity.”

I had noticed, almost as soon as I had moved in with them, how touchy Charley was with her. He seemed to resent her asking him to do anything, even to helping her around the garden. One night, when she asked him to open a can or ajar for her—I didn’t see it cleanly, although I came in from my room to watch—he blew up, threw the jar down on the floor, and started calling her names. I noted that in my records, because I could perceive a pattern.

Once a week or so Charley would go off by himself, usually down to the Western Bar, or a bar in Olema that he liked, and get tanked up on beer. That seemed to be his system for getting his resentment of my sister out into the open; otherwise it merely simmered away down inside him, making him quarrelsome and moody. But when he had had a few drinks he could threaten her physically. I never saw him actually hit her, but I could tell by her response, when he came home from the bar, that at such times she was genuinely afraid of him. I don’t think she realized why he drank, that he was releasing stored-up resentment; she thought of it more as a character defect on his part, and possibly a defect common with all men.

Each time he went off drinking she became more businesslike with him. She shafted him with quiet, national upbraiding. Over a period of time she managed to convince him that there was something wrong with him for going out and drinking and coming home and taking a few swings at her; instead of viewing it as a simple means of working off steam she chose to consider it a symptom of some deep pervasive—even dangerous—malformation in him.

Or possibly she only pretended to think that. In any case it was her policy to regard him as a malformed man, one who should be matched, and by talking along this line she made hay from each of his binges. The more he resisted her by going out and getting drunk and coming home and taking a swing at her, the more she built up this picture of him, and it was a picture that when not drunk he, too, had to accept. The household was prevaded by this atmosphere of a calm adult woman and a man who gave in to his animal impulses. She reported to him in great detail what her analyst, Dr. Andrews in San Francisco, said about his binges and his hostility; she used Charley’s money to pay Dr. Andrews to catalog his abnormalities. And of course Charley never heard anything directly from the doctor; he had no way of keeping her from reporting what served her and holding back what did not. The doctor, too, had no way to get at the truth of what she told him; no doubt she only gave him the facts that suited her picture, so that the doctor’s view of Charley was based on what she wanted him to know. By the time she had edited it both going and coming there was little of it outside her control.

Like any slob, Charley grumbled at her going to the doctor and at the same time took as holy writ whatever she reported. Any man who charged twenty dollars an hour had to be good.

Sometimes I asked myself what she was up to, if anything. I had nothing to do in the early afternoons, after I had done the lunch dishes, and I now and then sat around and watched her mold her clay pots or knit or read; she had turned out to be a good-looking woman, although she had little on no bust line, and she had this big modern house, with ten acres and all the rest of it—beyond any doubt she was happy. But she wanted something she lacked. After a month or so I came to the conclusion that she simply wanted Charley to be different from what he was; she had a deeply ingrained image of what a husband should be like—she was always very choosy—and although in some respects he met her requirements, in others he did not. For instance, he had enough money to build this house, and he did most of the things she wanted. And he was reasonably good-looking. But for one thing he was a slob, and there has always been this aristocratic, disapproving, judging tendency in Fay. It showed up strongly in high school when she began to work toward going to college; she took courses in literature and history and felt that the girls who took cooking courses—and the boys who took shop courses—were the riffraff of the world.