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Coming Home, Etc.
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (September 7, 1912) : 22
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      Probably the reason every one so enjoys coming home is because home is the only place which is the least tactful about receiving one. It has an air of helpless emptiness, an appearance of saying, “I know I’m in rather a pickle, but that’s what happens when you go off and leave me.” And, of course, the thing we each of us love best is the thing that gets into a pickle the moment we leave it. As proof positive think of the attachment different people have for a business or a husband or various other employments. We make a tremendous clatter about not being able to get away, but the sense that it would be calamitous if we did go is the thing that keeps us cheerful. Some women never dare leave their homes for fear of the revelation that it could get on without them.
      If we leave a city and return to it joyously we are reduced to tearful depression, for it has all the marks of rather having improved during our absence. Buildings have certainly grown more rapidly than they used to in our day. Friends are notoriously treacherous if left for a minute. They build new houses, acquire new intimates, collect interesting experiences, and all at a rate of speed that seems mere unkindness to those absent. Friends are notoriously treacherous if left for a minute. They build new houses, acquire new intimates, collect interesting experiences, and all at a rate of speed that seems mere unkindness to those absent. Hotels and points of pilgrimage give one the sense of being an insignificant link in an endless chain forever pulled along. One but replaces the link ahead and is replaced by the link behind. Chambermaids bring in clean linen for other people, just as porters carry out your trunks, and you have almost the feeling of being ejected. But home — it is so different.
      When you leave you tell every one everything he is to do during your entire absence, so that what you take away with you is the pleasant belief that every one would have behaved like a dunce if you had not expressly commanded him to be very intelligent and do precisely what he always has done. Then all the time you are away you write to ask if anything dreadful has happened yet and you are told that nothing has. Naturally you put this down to the good order in which you left things. They write that it is dull at home and you see the entire place lying bound in a sleep of numbness, which serves as the perfect background for your own lively times. Then you return and as you approach the house you see that the drawing-room blinds are quite uneven. That is much more soothing a reception than a triumphal arch, for you can at once put it right, which installs you in your old place and bucks you up tremendously. Next you go to your own room and all the furnishings are out of place if only by half an inch. The room has a desolate air of not being lived in and it is distressingly tidy. The closets look so empty with nothing in them except a dressing-gown so limp that it is obvious the heart has gone out of it, and coat-hangers jangling miserably together like family skeletons too discouraged to grow to decent dimensions. You discover dust where dust would never be if you had been at home and you go about gayly hugging the secret belief that disintegration would have set in if you had stayed away another day.

      It is doubtful if women should be respected when one remembers the length of time for which they have uncomplainingly kept house. They should either have laid down conditions under which they would do it or there should have been a tremendous revolt long ago. That there never has been one and, worse, that they each above all else crave a house to keep makes one wonder if there is not something innately servile in the feminine character. The life of a housekeeper is not a life at all. It is a maelstrom of petty charges, always with the point of view on the part of the accusing party that the offense is criminal. The feminine head of the house is a sort of absorbent well into which suggestions, questions, and complaints are thrown. People go calling through the house — always an objectionable thing to do — for the sole purpose of disturbing the housekeeper with the exclamation, “My pleated shirts have not come home from the laundry!”
      The housekeeper very nicely says, “Dear, dear, what a pity!”
      The other person says, “Yes, but I wanted my pleated shirts."
      “I’m so sorry,” says the housekeeper.
      “Can’t you do something about it?” says the other person.
      “I might telephone and get them to bring them to-morrow,” says the housekeeper.
      “But I want them now,” says the other person, bristling with irritation. “You might at least go and give them the very deuce of a rowing.”
      So the housekeeper stops whatever she was doing to go and give them a rowing. That is only one of the things that happen to housekeepers. At dinner a voice says, “The cream is sour!” Another voice echoes it and a third voice says, “It’s abominable!” Then every one says, looks accusingly at the housekeeper. She remarks that there was thunder about five, but takes the whole responsibility for it on her own shoulders and apologizes right and left for having done it. The cream was just as sour for her as it was for any one else, but that does not matter. She is the housekeeper. Such a life cannot be good for the character. It leads to duplicity, guile, constant apologies (always undermining to the soul), and sometimes it leads to lying.
      A housekeeper, if she is to live to any age at all, must protect herself somehow, and if she does not relieve congestion by nagging she protects herself by most insidious conduct. She is not to be blamed — any one with a spark of spirit would lie. Families always attribute all their ills to the food, and it is very hard to have other people’s indigestion blamed on one. If at such moments she says it is something she never ordered and a wild play on the part of the grocer it is not to be wondered at. There is something provocative about the appearance of a housekeeper. The moment she enters a room some one says, “Isn’t dinner ready?” They know dinner never is ready twenty minutes before the appointed time, but they think that is the proper way to talk to a housekeeper. That is just the kind of person families are made up of and housekeepers should have mastered long ago.
 

an aside —

a passage roughly congruent with — or that arguably intersects with — the first of the two pieces above is found in Tess Slesinger, her story “Young Wife” (1931). Esther returns to her home and husband, Mark, after a week away — something literary or academic? — and a brief affair with David. That one-night stand somehow returns her to herself (“after a year of half-resentful submission... now she was his [Mark’s] equal”). The story is about that return, and knowledge that nothing will be quite the same again
      But it is returning to a place that makes it a home... [703]
      She had expected everything, nourished by the secret of her night with David, to be different, new. But everything was the same. Only that Esther was tortured by the impossibility of picturing, of believing in, Mark's life during those seven days in which she had been away. She was unreasoningly jealous that he had continued to eat, to sleep, to live, without her. But the present grew so substantial, so enduring, so much like a thing which had always gone on and always would, just so, without any changes, that sometimes Esther wondered if she had been away. [705] and
      She had built with David a small house. Then she had turned him out of it, because she wanted to live in it alone, she wanted to take refuge from Mark... The house did not exist because Mark did not see it... [707]

A reason I am inclined to make the connection (Tess Slesinger, to Florida Pier) is that “Young Wife” appears immediately following the latter’s story “Bigger and Worse Lies” [info] Slesinger would have been but seven years old when the above appeared, but I suspect that she would be familiar with the writing of Florida Pier. Or maybe it was something in the air.
      “Young Wife” was not included in the two collections (1935, 1971) of Slesinger’s stories. E. F. Benson (1867-1949)
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7 August 2026