shouting to everybody else, “He sent Hattie his letter—and then he wasn’t there!” I was disgraced, notorious, a pariah; and I couldn’t go home to hide my shame. To leave a party before it was over was an action of itself unthinkable, and my hat was in the “gentlemen’s dressing room.” Nobody could go home without his best hat; he couldn’t.
A Deflated Eight-Year-Old
Furtive, despairing, I lurked in shadows that ominously grew longer. Sunset had come when at last I crept round that large house to slide in by the back door—for if I faced hell itself I had to get my hat. On the rear veranda three large ice-cream freezers stood exhausted; refreshments—insanely forfeited by me—were of the past, and the party must be near its shocked close. I slipped into the kitchen unnoticed, passed quiveringly through a rear hall, opened a door—and was at the party again. Boys and girls in paper caps were whooping, running, charging into one another, falling down, upsetting furniture, and banging all over the house in the liberated exhilaration that is the last stage of a successful children’s party.
I’d expected a dreadful outcry; I’d thought to see dozens of accusing fingers pointed at me and to hear a cruel damning chorus, “There he is!” Clutching hands would be upon my shoulders while horrid voices screamed for the hostess to come and do her will upon me: “Mrs. Browning, hurry! We’ve caught Booth Tarkington! Here he is!”
Nobody even looked at me; I might have been an invisible boy. The late Mr. Dillinger walking into a crowded police station only to find himself utterly ignored might have felt part of what emotion then possessed me.
I caught a friend by the arm as he was dashing by me.
“Page, wait!” I begged. “What did Hattie do?”
“Let go me!” Page said. “What did Hattie do when?”
I gulped. “When I—when I jumped out of the window.”
“Did you?” Page said. “Let go me! Sam Miller’s after me and I got to run!””
The truth came upon me strangely, strangely. Nobody knew that I’d jumped out of the window. Hattie didn’t know it—nobody in the world knew it. Nobody even knew that during most of that party I hadn’t been present. Where I was or what I did didn’t mean anything to anybody.
I was freed of guilt, but plunged into a profound meditation.
Through the early twilight I walked home alone, with my head down and my shiny shoes moving slowly. Something had departed out of me and I seemed to consist of a walking vacancy. It was then, at about eight and a half years of age, that I lost a great part of the puffed-uppedness devotedly blown into me for years by loved ones at home. For the first time I seemed to perceive that I was nobody at all. So, during that slow trudge homeward after the party, I ceased to be a little child and became a growing boy.
1. On July 29, 1869.
2. Newton Booth—brother of Tarkington’s mother Elizabeth—assumed the governorship of California on December 8, 1871. He served until February 1875, when, having been elected to the U.S. Senate, he resigned.
3. The Hunchbergs, Simpledoria, and Bill Hammersly all appear in Tarkington’s Beasley’s Christmas Party (1909). In that novella, Uncle Newton serves as the model for Congressman David Beasley, who entertains his handicapped young cousin Hamilton Swift, Jr., by playing games with Simpledoria and the imaginary Bill Hammersley (spelled this way) and by having the Hunchbergs for dinner. Beasley’s Christmas Party itself is a reworking of Tarkington’s story “Beasley and the Hunchbergs,” published in Cosmopolitan in 1905. The names Beasley and Hunchberg show up, too, in unpublished Tarkington juvenilia.
4. Newton Booth first arrived in California in 1850.
5. Tarkington alludes here to his alcoholism. He swore off alcohol for good in early 1912, soon after he had suffered a heart attack—and after his first wife, Louisa, divorced him.
II. Beaten Boy
As I now examine the flowering of my childhood’s vanity—my natural-born egoism cultivated daily by the flatteries of my parents and my sister—I find that in contact with the similar blossoms of contemporaries my own began to wilt rather early. Sometimes, however, grown people helped on the withering, and at the age of six I’d had a hot afternoon in Terre Haute when adults made the cherished rose of my self-conceit shed petals copiously. That afternoon, in semipublic, so to say, I told a lie of the kind typically used by unimportant human beings for the purpose of presenting an impressive appearance. It’s true, though, that I didn’t myself invent the lie; my Grandmother Booth made me a present of it. She didn’t realize that it was a lie; she thought of it as a convenience and gave it to me because that was the only way to get me to do what she wished.
I was visiting her in Terre Haute and she’d asked me to go forth and buy a needle for her at the largest dry-goods store on the principal business street of the town. I had never been in that store; and to my mind it was a vast emporium, formidable and likely to be contemptuous of a customer of my size and age. When she gave me a copper cent and told me that was the price of a needle I was to buy, I made a great to-do, loudly declining to enter so awesome a bazaar for the purpose of spending a mere penny. I might be held up to ridicule, I protested.
A Penny Tragedy
“Not at all,” my grandmother said. “When the clerk hands you the needle and you give him the penny, just laugh and say, ‘I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!’ That’ll make it all right.”
I thought it would. The ladylike laugh and the little lie seemed plausible. I left the house cheerfully, practicing my contemplated airy laugh as I went. All the way to Main Street I rehearsed, amusedly saying over and over, as I trudged along the hot brick sidewalk, “I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!”
Inside the big store I found my confidence at once enfeebled. The noon hour had just passed; the hotness of the day was that of an Indiana town in a midsummer heat wave, ninety-eight in the shade. I was the only customer in that whole cavern; an interminable avenue stretched before me, bordered by polished wooden counters behind which drooped male and female clerks, languidly waving palm-leaf fans in a daunting silence. I went to the nearest counter, spoke to the whiskered, pallid young man behind it, and faintly told him what I wanted. He stopped fanning himself, yawned, sighed, found the described needle, wrapped it in a wisp of paper, silently handed it to me, and I gave him my copper.
Then, already with a sinking feeling and a voice perhaps somewhat tremulous, I did my practiced laugh for him and said bravely, “I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life!”
He leaned across the counter and looked down at me, spoke in a startling voice. “What did you say?”
I was sorry I’d said it and wished not to repeat it, but felt that I had to do so. I omitted the society laugh because I wasn’t able to produce it. “I—I believe this is the very smallest purchase I ever made in my life.”
I desired to leave the place, but couldn’t. This man had a powerful air of not having closed the episode. He looked at the clerks behind the other counters, beckoned, and called their names. “Come
