Call It Sleep

BOOK I / The Cellar

I

STANDING before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again became aware that this world had been created without thought of him. He was thirsty, but the iron hip of the sink rested on legs tall almost as his own body, and by no stretch of arm, no leap, could he ever reach the distant tap. Where did the water come from that lurked so secretly in the curve of the brass? Where did it go, gurgling in the drain? What a strange world must be hidden behind the walls of a house! But he was thirsty.

“Mama!” he called, his voice rising above the hiss of sweeping in the frontroom. “Mama, I want a drink.”

The unseen broom stopped to listen. “I’ll be there in a moment,” his mother answered. A chair squealed on its castors; a window chuckled down; his mother’s approaching tread.

Standing in the doorway on the top step (two steps led up into the frontroom) his mother smilingly surveyed him. She looked as tall as a tower. The old grey dress she wore rose straight from strong bare ankle to waist, curved round the deep bosom and over the wide shoulders, and set her full throat in a frame of frayed lace. Her smooth, sloping face was flushed now with her work, but faintly so, diffused, the color of a hand beneath wax. She had mild, full lips, brown hair. A vague, fugitive darkness blurred the hollow above her cheekbone, giving to her face and to her large brown eyes, set in their white ovals, a reserved and almost mournful air.

“I want a drink, mama,” he repeated.

“I know,” she answered, coming down the stairs. “I heard you.” And casting a quick, sidelong glance at him, she went over to the sink and turned the tap. The water spouted noisily down. She stood there a moment, smiling obscurely, one finger parting the turbulent jet, waiting for the water to cool. Then filling a glass, she handed it down to him.

“When am I going to be big enough?” he asked resentfully as he took the glass in both hands.

“There will come a time,” she answered, smiling. She rarely smiled broadly; instead the thin furrow along her upper lip would deepen. “Have little fear.”

With eyes still fixed on his mother, he drank the water in breathless, uneven gulps, then returned the glass to her, surprised to see its contents scarcely diminished.

“Why can’t I talk with my mouth in the water?”

“No one would hear you. Have you had your fill?”

He nodded, murmuring contentedly.

“And is that all?” she asked. Her voice held a faint challenge.

“Yes,” he said hesitantly, meanwhile scanning her face for some clue.

“I thought so,” she drew her head back in droll disappointment.

“What?”

“It is summer,” she pointed to the window, “the weather grows warm. Whom will you refresh with the icy lips the water lent you?”

“Oh!” he lifted his smiling face.

“You remember nothing,” she reproached him, and with a throaty chuckle, lifted him in her arms.

Sinking his fingers in her hair, David kissed her brow. The faint familiar warmth and odor of her skin and hair.

“There!” she laughed, nuzzling his cheek, “but you’ve waited too long; the sweet chill has dulled. Lips for me,” she reminded him, “must always be cool as the water that wet them.” She put him down.

“Sometime I’m going to eat some ice,” he said warningly, “then you’ll like it.”

She laughed. And then soberly, “Aren’t you ever going down into the street? The morning grows old.”

“Aaa!”

“You’d better go. Just for a little while. I’m going to sweep here, you know.”

“I want my calendar first,” he pouted, invoking his privilege against the evil hour.

“Get it then. But you’ve got to go down afterwards.”

He dragged a chair over beneath the calendar on the wall, clambered up, plucked off the outworn leaf, and fingered the remaining ones to see how far off the next red day was. Red days were Sundays, days his father was home. It always gave David a little qualm of dread to watch them draw near.

“Now you have your leaf,” his mother reminded him. “Come.” She stretched out her arms.

He held back. “Show me where my birthday is.”

“Woe is me!” She exclaimed with an impatient chuckle. “I’ve shown it to you every day for weeks now.”

“Show me again.”

She rumpled the pad, lifted a thin plaque of leaves. “July—” she murmured, “July 12th … There!” She found it. “July 12th, 1911. You’ll be six then.”

David regarded the strange figures gravely. “Lots of pages still,” he informed her.

“Yes.”

“And a black day too.”

“On the calendar,” she laughed, “only on the calendar. Now do come down!”

Grasping her arm, he jumped down from the chair. “I must hide it now.” He explained.

“So you must. I see I’ll never finish my work today.”

Too absorbed in his own affairs to pay much heed to hers, he went over to the pantry beneath the cupboard, opened the door and drew out a shoe-box, his treasure chest.

“See how many I’ve got already?” he pointed proudly to the fat sheaf of rumpled leaves inside the box.

“Wonderful!” She glanced at the box in perfunctory admiration. “You peel off the year as one might a cabbage. Are you ready for your journey?”

“Yes.” He put away the box without a trace of alacrity.

“Where is your sailor blouse?” she murmured looking about. “With the white strings in it? What have I—?” She found it. “There is still a little wind.”

David held up his arms for her to slip the blouse over his head.

“Now, my own,” she said, kissing his reemerging face. “Go down and play.” She led him toward the door and opened it. “Not too far. And remember if I don’t call you, wait until the whistle blows.”

He went out into the hallway. Behind him, like an eyelid shutting, the soft closing of the door winked out the light. He assayed the stairs, lapsing below him into darkness, and grasping one by one each slender upright to the banister, went down. David never found himself alone on these stairs, but he wished there were no carpet covering them. How could you hear the sound of your own feet in the dark if a carpet muffled every step you took? And if you couldn’t hear the sound of your own feet and couldn’t see anything either, how could you be sure you were actually there and not dreaming? A few steps from the bottom landing, he paused and stared rigidly at the cellar door. It bulged with darkness. Would it hold?… It held! He jumped from the last steps and raced through the narrow hallway to the light of the street. Flying through the doorway was like butting a wave. A dazzling breaker of sunlight burst over his head, swamped him in reeling blur of brilliance, and then receded … A row of frame houses half in thin shade, a pitted gutter, a yawning ashcan, flotsam on the shore, his street.

Blinking and almost shaken, he waited on the low stoop a moment, until his whirling vision steadied. Then for the first time, he noticed that seated on the curbstone near the house was a boy, whom an instant later, he recognized. It was Yussie who had just moved into David’s house and who lived on the floor above. Yussie had a very red, fat face. His big sister walked with a limp and wore strange iron slats on one of her legs. What was he doing, David wondered, what did he have in his hands? Stepping down from the stoop, he drew near, and totally disregarded, stood beside him.

Yussie had stripped off the outer shell of an alarm-clock. Exposed, the brassy, geometric vitals ticked when prodded, whirred and jingled falteringly.

“It still c’n go,” Yussie gravely enlightened him. David sat down. Fascinated, he stared at the shining cogs that moved without moving their hearts of light. “So wot makes id?” he asked. In the street David spoke English.

“Kentcha see? Id’s coz id’s a machine.”

“Oh!”

“It wakes op mine fodder in de mawning.”

“It wakes op mine fodder too.”

“It tells yuh w’en yuh sh’d eat an’ w’en yuh have tuh go tuh sleep. It shows yuh w’en, but I tooked it off.”

“I god a calenduh opstai’s.” David informed him.

“Puh! Who ain’ god a calenduh?”

“I save mine. I godda big book outa dem, wit numbuhs on id.”

“Who can’t do dat?”

“But mine fodder made it,” David drove home the one unique point about it all.

“Wot’s your fodder?”

“Mine fodder is a printer.”

“Mine fodder woiks inna joolery shop. In Brooklyn. Didja ever live in Brooklyn?”

“No.” David shook his head.

“We usetuh — right near my fodder’s joolery shop on Rainey Avenyuh. W’ea does your fodder woik?”

David tried to think. “I don’t know.” He finally confessed, hoping that Yussie would not pursue the subject further.

He didn’t. Instead “I don’ like Brownsville,” he said. “I like Brooklyn bedder.”

David felt relieved.

“We usetuh find cigahs innuh gudduh,” Yussie continued. “An we usetuh t’row ’em on de ladies, and we usetuh run. Who you like bedder, ladies or gents?”

“Ladies.”

“I like mine fodder bedder,” said Yussie. “My mudder always holluhs on me.” He pried a nail between two wheels. A bright yellow gear suddenly snapped off and fell to the gutter at his feet. He picked it up, blew the dust off, and rose. “Yuh want?”

“Yea,” David reached for it.

Yussie was about to drop it into his outstretched palm, but on second thought, drew back. “No. Id’s liddle like a penny. Maybe I c’n pud id inna slod machine ’n’ gid gum. Hea, yuh c’n take dis one.” He fished a larger gear out of his pocket, gave it to David. “Id’s a quarter. Yuh wanna come?”

David hesitated. “I godduh waid hea till duh wissle blows.”

“W’a wissle?”

“By de fectory. All togedder.”

“So?”

“So den I c’n go opstai’s.”

“So w’y?”

“Cuz dey blow on twelve a’clock an’ den dey blow on five a’clock. Den I c’n go op.”

Yussie eyed him curiously. “I’m gonna gid gum,” he said, shrugging off his perplexity. “In duh slod machine.” And he ambled off in the direction of the candy store on the corner.

Holding the little wheel in his hand, David wondered again why it was that every boy on the street knew where his father worked except himself. His father had so many jobs. No sooner did you learn where he was working than he was working somewhere else. And why was he always saying, “They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can a man endure? May the fire of God consume them!” A terrifying picture rose in David’s mind — the memory of how once at the supper table his mother had dared to say that perhaps the men weren’t really looking at him crookedly, perhaps he was only imagining it. His father had snarled then. And with one sudden sweep of his arm had sent food and dishes crashing to the floor. And other pictures came in its train, pictures of the door being kicked open and his father coming in looking pale and savage and sitting down like old men sit down, one trembling hand behind him groping for the chair. He wouldn’t speak. His jaws, and even his joints, seemed to have become fused together by a withering rage. David often dreamed of his father’s footsteps booming on the stairs, of the glistening doorknob turning, and of himself clutching at knives he couldn’t lift from the table.

Brooding, engrossed in his thoughts, engrossed in the rhythmic, accurate teeth of the yellow cog in his hand, the thin bright circles whirling restlessly without motion, David was unaware that a little group of girls had gathered in the gutter some distance away. But when they began to sing, he started and looked up. Their faces were sober, their hands locked in one another; circling slowly in a ring they chanted in a plaintive nasal chorus:

“Waltuh, Waltuh, Wiuhlflowuh,

Growin’ up so high;

So we are all young ladies,

An’ we are ready to die.”

Again and again, they repeated their burden. Their words obscure at first, emerged at last, gathered meaning. The song troubled David strangely. Walter Wildflower was a little boy. David knew him. He lived in Europe, far away, where David’s mother said he was born. He had seen him standing on a hill, far away. Filled with a warm, nostalgic mournfulness, he shut his eyes. Fragments of forgotten rivers floated under the lids, dusty roads, fathomless curve of trees, a branch in a window under flawless light. A world somewhere, somewhere else.

“Waltuh, Waltuh, Wiuhlflowuh,

Growin’ up so high,”

His body relaxed, yielding to the rhythm of the song and to the golden June sunlight. He seemed to rise and fall on waves somewhere without him. Within him a voice spoke with no words but with the shift of slow flame.…

“So we are all young ladies,

An’ we are ready to die.”

From the limp, uncurling fingers, the cog rolled to the ground, rang like a coin, fell over on its side. The sudden sound moored him again, fixed him to the quiet, suburban street, the curbstone. The inarticulate flame that had pulsed within him, wavered and went out. He sighed, bent over and picked up the wheel.

When would the whistle blow he wondered. It took long to-day.…

II

AS FAR back as he could remember, this was the first time that he had ever gone anywhere alone with his father, and already he felt desolated, stirred with dismal forebodings, longing desperately for his mother. His father was so silent and so remote that he felt as though he were alone even at his side. What if his father should abandon him, leave him in some lonely street. The thought sent shudders of horror through his body. No! No! He couldn’t do that!

At last they reached the trolley lines. The sight of people cheered him again, dispelling his fear for a while. They boarded a car, rode what seemed to him a long time and then got off in a crowded street under an elevated. Nervously gripping David’s arm, his father guided him across the street. They stopped before the stretched iron wicket of a closed theatre. Colored billboards on either side of them, the odor of stale perfume behind. People hurrying, trains roaring. David gazed about him frightened. To the right of the theatre, in the window of an ice cream parlor, gaudy, colored popcorn danced and drifted, blown by a fan. He looked up apprehensively at his father. He was pale, grim. The fine veins in his nose stood out like a pink cobweb.

“Do you see that door?” Hé shook him into attention. “In the grey house. See? That man just came out of there.”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Now you go in there and go up the stairs and you’ll see another door. Go right in. And to the first man you see inside, say this: I’m Albert Schearl’s son. He wants you to give me the clothes in his locker and the money that’s coming to him. Do you understand? When they’ve given it to you bring it down here. I’ll be waiting for you. Now what will you say?” he demanded abruptly.

David began to repeat his instructions in Yiddish.

“Say it in English, you fool!”

He rendered them in English. And when he had satisfied his father that he knew them, he was sent in.

“And don’t tell them I’m out here,” he was warned as he left. “Remember you came alone!”

Full of misgivings, unnerved at the ordeal of facing strangers alone, strangers of whom his own father seemed apprehensive, he entered the hallway, climbed the stairs. One flight up, he pushed open the door and entered a small room, an office. From somewhere back of this office, machinery clanked and rattled. A bald-headed man smoking a cigar looked up as he came in.

“Well, my boy,” he asked smiling, “what do you want?”

For a moment all of his instructions flew out of his head. “My — my fodder sent me hea.” He faltered.

“Your father? Who’s he?”

“I–I’m Albert Schearl’s son,” he blurted out. “He sent me I shuh ged his clo’s f’om de locker an’ his money you owing him.”

“Oh, you’re Albert Schearl’s son,” said the man, his expression changing. “And he wants his money, eh?” He nodded with the short vibrating motion of a bell. “You’ve got some father, my boy. You can tell him that for me. I didn’t get a chance. He’s crazy. Anybody who— What does he do at home?”

David shook his head guiltily, “Nuttin.”

“No?” he chuckled. “Nothin’, hey? Well—” he broke off and went over to a small arched window in the rear. “Joe!” he called. “Oh Joe! Come here a minute, will you?”

In a few seconds a grey-haired man in overalls came in.

“Call me, Mr. Lobe?”

“Yea, will you get Schearl’s things out of his locker and wrap ’em up for me. His kid’s here.”

The other man’s face broke into a wide, brown-toothed grin. “Is zat his kid?” As if to keep from laughing his tongue worried the quid of tobacco in his cheek.

“Yea.”

“He don’ look crazy.” He burst into a laugh.

“No.” Mr. Lobe subdued him with a wave of the hand. “He’s a nice kid.”

“Your ol’ man near brained me wid a hammer,” said the man addressing David. “Don’ know wot happened, nobody said nuttin.” He grinned. “Never saw such a guy, Mr. Lobe. Holy Jesus, he looked like he wuz boinin’ up. Didja see de rail he twisted wid his hands? Maybe I oughta to give it to ’im fer a souvenir?”

Mr. Lobe grinned. “Let the kid alone,” he said quietly. “Get his stuff.”

“O.K.” Still chuckling, the grey-haired man went out.

“Sit down, my boy,” said Mr. Lobe, pointing to a seat. “We’ll have your father’s things here in a few minutes.”

David sat down. In a few minutes, a girl, bearing a paper in her hand, came into the office.

“Say, Marge,” said Mr. Lobe, “find out what Schearl gets, will you.”

“Yes, Mr. Lobe.” She regarded David, “What’s that, his boy?”

“Mmm.”

“Looks like him, don’t he?”

“Maybe.”

“I’d have him arrested,” said the girl opening up a large-ledger.

“What good would that do?”

“I don’t know, it might put some sense into his head.”

Mr. Lobe shrugged. “I’m only too glad he didn’t kill anybody.”

“He ought to be in a padded cell,” said the girl scribbling something on a paper.

Mr. Lobe made no response.

“He gets six sixty-two.” She put down her pencil. “Shall I get it?”

“Mmm.”

The girl went over to a large black safe in a corner, drew out a box, and when she had counted out some money, put it into a small envelope and gave it to Mr. Lobe.

“Come here,” he said to David. “What’s your name?”

“David.”

“David and Goliath,” he smiled. “Well, David, have you got a good deep pocket? Let’s see.” He picked up the tails of David’s jacket. “There, that’s the one I want.” And fingering the small watch-pocket at the waist. “We’ll put it in there.” He folded the envelope and wedged it in. “Now don’t take it out. Don’t tell anybody you’ve got it till you get home, understand? The idea, sending a kid his age on an errand like this.”

David, staring ahead of him, under Mr. Lobe’s arm, was aware of two faces, peering in at the little window in the back. The eyes of both were fastened on him, regarding him with a curious and amused scrutiny of men beholding for the first time some astonishing freak. They both grinned when the girl, happening to turn in their direction, saw them; one of the men winked and cranked his temple with his hand. As Mr. Lobe turned, both disappeared. A moment later, the grey-haired man returned with a paper-wrapped bundle.

“Here’s all I c’n find, Mr. Lobe. His towel, and his shoit an’ a jacket.”

“All right, Joe,” Mr. Lobe took the package from him and turned to David. “Here you are, my boy. Put it under your arm and don’t lose it.” He tucked it under David’s arm. “Not heavy, is it? No? That’s good.” He opened the door to let David pass. “Good bye.” A dry smile whisked over his features. “Pretty tough for you.”

Grasping the bundle firmly under his arm, David went slowly down the stairs. So that was how his father quit a place! He held a hammer in hand, he would have killed somebody. David could almost see him, the hammer raised over his head, his face contorted in terrific wrath, the rest cringing away. He shuddered at the image in his mind, stopped motionless on the stair, terrified at having to confront the reality. But he must go down; he must meet him; it would be worse for him if he remained on the stair any longer. He didn’t want to go, but he had to. If only the stairs were twice as high.

He hurried down, came out into the street. His father, his back pressed close to the iron wicket, was waiting for him, and when he saw him come out, motioned to him to hurry and began walking away. David ran after him, caught up to him finally, and his father, without slackening his pace, relieved him of the bundle.

“They took long enough,” he said, casting a malevolent glance over his shoulder. It was evident from his face that he had worked himself into a rage during the interval that David had left him. “They gave you the money?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“How much?”

“Six — six dollars, the girl—”

“Did they say anything to you?” His teeth clenched grimly, “About me?”

“No, Papa,” he answered hurriedly. “Nothing, Papa. They just gave me the — the money and I went down.”

“Where is it?”

“Over here,” he pointed to the pocket.

“Well, give it to me!”

With difficulty, David uprooted the envelope from his pocket. His father snatched it from him, counted the money.

“And so they said nothing, eh?” He seemed to demand a final confirmation. “None of the men spoke to you, did they? Only that bald-headed pig with the glasses?” He was watching him narrowly.

“No, Papa. Only that man. He just gave me the money.” He knew that while his father’s eyes rested on him he must look frank, he must look wide-eyed, simple.

“Very well!” His lips stretched for a brief instant in fleeting satisfaction. “Good!”

They stopped at the corner and waited for the trolley …

* * *

David never said anything to anyone of what he had discovered, not even to his mother — it was all too terrifying, too unreal to share with someone else. He brooded about it till it entered his sleep, till he no longer could tell where his father was flesh and where dream. Who would believe him if he said, I saw my father lift a hammer; he was standing on a high roof of darkness, and below him were faces uplifted, so many, they stretched like white cobbles to the end of the world; who would believe him? He dared not.

III

THE table had been set with the best dishes. There was a chicken roasting in the oven. His mother was pouring the last of the Passover’s lustrous red wine from the wicker-covered bottle into the fat flagon. She had been quiet till now, but as she set the bottle down in the center of the table, she turned to David who was watching her. “I feel something I don’t know what,” she said. “Troubled.” She looked at the floor a moment, gazing mournfully at nothing; then turned up her palm as if asking herself, “why,” and sighing let her hands fall again, as if unanswered. “Perhaps it is because I think my work is fated to be lost.”

David wondered a moment why she had said that, and then he remembered. That man was coming, that man whose name had been on his father’s lips for the last week — ever since he had gotten his new job. That man was a foreman. His father said that they came from the same region in far-off Austria. How strange it was that they should come from far away and find each other in the same shop, and find each other living in the same neighborhood in Brownsville. His father had said that he had found a true friend now, but his mother had sighed. And now she sighed again and said that her work was fated to be lost. David hoped that she would be wrong. He wanted to be like the other boys in the street. He wanted to be able to say where his father worked.

Soon he heard his father’s voice on the stairs. His mother rose, looked about her hastily to see whether all was prepared and then went to the door and opened it. The two men came in, his father first and the other man after him.

“Well, here we are,” said his father with nervous heartiness. “This is my wife. This is Joe Luter, my countryman. And that over there,” he pointed to David, “is what will pray for me after my death. Make yourself at home.”

“A fine home you have here,” said the other smiling at David’s mother. “Very, very fine,” he beamed.

“It’s livable,” answered David’s mother.

“A fine boy too.” He eyed David approvingly.

“Well!” said his father abruptly, “Let’s have some dinner soon, eh?”

While his father was urging Luter to drink some wine, David examined the newcomer. In height he was not as tall as his father, but was much broader, fleshier, and unlike his father had a fair paunch. His face was somehow difficult to get accustomed to. It was not because it was particularly ugly or because it was scarred, but because one felt one’s own features trying to imitate it while one looked at it. His mouth so very short and the bow of his lips so very thick and arched that David actually felt himself waiting for it to relax. And the way his nostrils swelled up and out almost fatigued one and one hoped the deep dimples in his cheek would soon fill out. His speech was very slow and level, his whole attitude tolerant and attentive, and because of this and because of the permanent wreathing of his features, he gave one the impression of great affability and good nature. In fact, as it soon turned out, he was not only affable, but very appreciative and very polite and commended in very warm tones the wine and the cake that was served with it, the neatness of the house as compared to his landlady’s and finally congratulated David’s father on having so excellent a wife.

When supper was served, he refused to begin eating until David’s mother had sat down — which embarrassed her since she always served the others first — and then during the meal was very considerate of everyone, passing meat and bread and salt before it was asked for. When he spoke, he included everyone in the conversation, sometimes by asking questions, sometimes by fixing his eyes upon one. All of which disconcerted David not a little. Accustomed as he was to almost silent meals, to being either ignored or taken for granted, he resented this forcing of self-awareness upon him, this intruding of questions like a false weave into the fabric and pattern of his thought. But chiefly he found himself resenting Mr. Luter’s eyes. They seemed to be independent of his speech, far outstripping it in fact; for instead of glancing at one, they fixed one and then held on until the voice caught up. It became a kind of uneasy game with David, a kind of secret tag, to beat Luter’s gaze before it caught him, to look down at the tablecloth or at his mother the very moment he felt these eyes veering toward him.

Conversation touched on many subjects, drifting from the problems of the printing trade and the possibilities of a union among the printers to the problems and possibilities (and blessings, said Luter with a smile) of marriage. And then from this land to the old land and back again to this. And whether David’s mother kept a kosher house — at which she smiled — and whether David’s father still had time to don phylacteries in the morning and what synagogue he attended — at which his father snorted, amused. Most of what they said interested David only vaguely. What did fascinate him, however, was the curious effect that Luter had on his father. For once that brusque, cold manner of his had thawed a little. A faint though guarded deference mitigated somewhat the irrevocable quality with which his voice always bound his words. He would ask at the end of a statement he had just made, “Don’t you think so?” Sometimes he would begin by saying, “It seems to me.” It was strange. It disturbed David. He didn’t know whether to be grateful to Luter for softening the harsh, inflexible edge of his father’s temperament, or to be uneasy. Somehow it was a little unreal to see his father expand this way, uncoil warily like a tense spring slowly released. And urged on by only a sympathetic look from Luter, to hear him speak of his youth, he, who was so taciturn and thin-lipped, whom David never could think of as having a youth, speaking of his youth, of the black and white bulls he had tended for his father (and try to hide a frown at the word, father, he, who never hid displeasure), how they had fed them mash from his father’s yeast mill, how he had won a prize with them from the hand of Franz Josef, the King. Why did Luter need to look that way to make his father speak? Why did Luter only need to say, “I don’t like the earth. It’s for peasants,” to make his father laugh, to make his father answer, “I think I do. I think when you come out of a house and step on the bare earth among the fields you’re the same man you were when you were inside the house. But when you step out on pavements, you’re someone else. You can feel your face change. Hasn’t that happened to you?” And all that Luter needed to say was, “Yes. You’re right, Albert,” and his father would take a deep breath of satisfaction. It was strange. Why had no one else ever succeeded in doing that? Why not his mother? Why not himself? No one except Luter.

His questions went unanswered. He only knew that when supper was over he wanted very much to like Luter. He wanted to like any man who praised his mother and guided his father into untrodden paths of amiability. He wanted to like him, but he couldn’t. But that would pass, he assured himself. As soon as Luter came again he would like him. Yes, the very next time. He was sure of it. He wanted to. As soon as he got used to his eyes. Yes.

A little while after dinner, Luter got up to go. His father protested that he had just come, that he ought to stay at least another hour.

“I also have to work in the morning,” Luter reminded him. “Otherwise I would stay. It’s heaven compared to my landlady’s.” And then he turned to David’s mother, and in his slow way, smiling, extended his hand. “I want to thank you a thousand times, Mrs. Schearl, I haven’t had so good a dinner or so much to eat since my last uncle was married.”

She reddened as she shook hands with him and laughed. “You’ve praised everything but the water you drank.”

“Yes.” He laughed also. “And the salt. But I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me if I said their flavor surpassed all others.”

And after exchanging “Good-nights” and patting David’s head (which David wasn’t quite reconciled to) he left.

“Ha!” his father exclaimed exultantly after he had gone. “I told you this cursed wandering from job to job would end. I’m working for Dolman’s Press to stay. Now time may bring something — who knows. There are two other foremen there. I’m as good a pressman as any of them. I know more about that iron juggler than they do. Who knows? Who knows? A little money. In time I might even suggest to him that we try— Well! In time! In time!”

“He looks like a very decent man,” said his mother.

“Wait till you really know him!”

And from Luter’s departure to his bedtime, David never remembered spending so serene an hour in his father’s presence.…

IV

“NOT a single one?” Luter was asking with some surprise. “Not in the old land either?”

The old land. David’s thoughts turned outward. Anything about the old land was always worth listening to.

“Not one,” his mother answered. “Nothing ever came to my hamlet except the snow and the rain. Not that I minded. Except once — yes. A man with a gramophone — the kind you listened to with ear pieces. It cost a penny to listen to it, and it wasn’t even worth that. I never heard anything labor so and squawk. But the peasants were awed. They swore there was a devil in the box.”

Luter laughed. “And that’s all you had seen before you came here to this turmoil?”

“I’ve seen little enough of it! I know that I myself live on one hundred and twenty-six Boddeh Stritt—”

“Bahday Street!” Her husband corrected her. “I’ve told you scores of times.”

“Boddeh Stritt,” she resumed apologetically. He shrugged. “It’s such a strange name — bath street in German. But here I am. I know there is a church on a certain street to my left, the vegetable market is to my right, behind me are the railroad tracks and the broken rocks, and before me, a few blocks away is a certain store window that has a kind of white-wash on it — and faces in the white-wash, the kind children draw. Within this pale is my America, and if I ventured further I should be lost. In fact,” she laughed, “were they even to wash that window, I might never find my way home again.”

His father made an impatient gesture. “Speaking of Yiddish plays,” he said, “I did see one. It was when I stayed with my father in Lemberg, the days of the great fair. They called it the Revenge of Samson. I can see him yet, blind, but shaggy again, waiting his time against the pagans. It moved me greatly.”

“For my part,” said Luter, “I go to the theatre to laugh. Shall I go there and be tormented when life itself is a plague? No, give me rather a mad jester or the antics of a spry wench.”

“I don’t care for that.” His father was brief.

“Well, I’m not mad about it either, you understand, but I was just saying sometimes when one is gloomy it does the heart good. Don’t you think great laughter heals the soul, Mrs. Schearl?”

“I suppose so.”

“There, you see! But listen, I have an idea. You know that the People’s Theatre always gives Dolman the job of printing its placards. Well, it has a stage that is never empty of tears — at least one good death rattle is heard every night. And if you like that sort of play, why I can talk to the agent or whatever he’s called and squeeze a whole month’s pass out of him. You know they change every week.”

“I don’t know whether I want to.” His father frowned dubiously.

“Why, certainly! It won’t be any trouble at all. And it won’t cost you a cent. I’ll get a pass for two, you watch me. I wish I had known this before.”

“Don’t trouble about me,” said his mother. “Many thanks, but I couldn’t possibly go away and leave David here alone.”

“Oh, that can be solved!” he assured her. “That’s the least of your worries. But first let me get the pass.” Luter left early that evening, before David was put to bed. And when he was gone, his father turned to his mother and said, “Well, did I make a mistake when I said this man was my friend? Did I? Here is one who knows how to express friendship, here as well as in the shop. Tell me, do I know a decent man when I see him?”

“You do,” was the mild answer.

“And you with your fear of taking strangers into the house!” he continued scornfully. “Could you ever have a better boarder than he?”

“It isn’t that. I’m glad to serve him dinners regularly. But I do know that most often it’s better for friends to be a little apart than always together.”

“Nonsense!” He retorted. “It’s your silly pride.”

V

TRINKETS held in the mortar of desire, the fancy a trowel, the whim the builder. A wall, a tower, stout, secure, incredible, immuring the spirit from a flight of arrows, the mind, experience, shearing the flow of time as a rock shears water. The minutes skirted by, unknown.

His mother and father had left for the theatre, and he was alone with Luter. He would not see his mother again until morning, and morning, with his mother gone, had become remote and tentative. The tears had started to his eyes when she left, and Luter had said “Come child, do you begrudge your mother the little pleasure she may get to-night?” David had stared sullenly at the floor, aware that a great resentment against Luter was gathering within him. Had not Luter been the agent of his mother’s going? And now how dared he reprove him for weeping when she was gone! How did he know what it felt like to be left alone? It wasn’t his mother.

“Now you look just like your father.” Luter had laughed. “He has just such lips when he frowns.”

There had been something in his voice that had had a peculiar sting to it. Hurt, David had turned away and gotten out his box in the pantry in which he saved both the calendar leaves he collected and whatever striking odds and ends he found in the street. His mother called them his gems and often asked him why he liked things that were worn and old. It would have been hard to tell her. But there was something about the way in which the link of a chain was worn or the thread on a bolt or a castor-wheel that gave him a vague feeling of pain when he ran his fingers over them. They were like worn shoe-soles or very thin dimes. You never saw them wear, you only knew they were worn, obscurely aching.

He fingered one of his newly-found acquisitions. It was one of those perforated metal corks that the barber used to squirt perfumed water on one’s head. One could blow through it, peep through it, it could be strung on a thread. He dropped it back into the box and picked up instead the stretched helix of a small window-shade spring. If one had these on one’s feet instead of shoes, one might bound instead of walk. High as the roof; far away at once. Like Puss in Boots. But if the mouse changed back into an ogre inside the puss — just before he died — I’m a mouse — an ogre! — Then poor Puss would have swelled and swelled and—

Luter sighed. Startled, David looked up. I’m a mouse — I’m an ogre! The thought lingered. He eyed Luter furtively. Unaware that he was being watched, Luter had put down his paper and was staring ahead of him. Something curious had happened to his expression. The usually upturned, affable lines of his face either curved the other way now, downward, or where not curved were sharp, wedge-shaped at the eyes and mouth. And the eyes themselves, which were always so round and soft, had narrowed now, so narrow, the eyeballs looked charred, remote. His upper teeth gnawed the skin of his lips, drawing his face into a brooding frown. It worried David. A faint thrill of disquiet ran through him. He suddenly felt an intense desire to have someone else present in his house. It didn’t have to be his mother. Anybody would do — Yussie from upstairs. Even his father.

Luter rose. David hastily dropped his gaze. Deliberate, brown-clad legs approached (what?) passed by him (he relaxed) stopped before the wall (peered over his shoulder) the calendar. Luter thumbed the leaves (black, black, black, red, black, black) held up a thin sheaf, and with puckered lips, stared at the date as though something far more intricate and absorbing than the mere figures were depicted there. Then he lowered the upturned leaves slowly, cautiously (Why? Why so carefully? They had only one place they could fall to) and rubbed his hands.

On his way back to the chair, he glanced down at the empty shoe-box between David’s knees, emptied of everything except its calendar-leaves.

“Well!” His voice seemed amused, yet not entirely so, as if crossed by a slight start of surprise. “What are those? Do you get them from there?”

“Yes.” David looked up uneasily. “I save them.”

“Yesterday’s days? What do you want with them? To scribble on?”

“No. Just save.”

“Chm!” His laughing snort sounded unpleasant to David. “If I had so few days as you have I wouldn’t bother about them. And when you’re as old as I am—” he stopped, indulged in a short chuckle that pecked like a tiny hammer— “you’ll know that the only thing that matters are the days ahead.”

David tried not to look resentful for fear Luter would accuse him again of looking like his father. He wished he would go away. But instead Luter nodded, and smiling to himself, glanced at the clock.

“It’s time for you to go to bed now. It’s long after eight.”

He poured the various trinkets back into the box, went over to the pantry and stowed them away in the corner.

“Do you know how to undress yourself?”

“Yes.”

“You’d better go in and ‘pee’ first,” he advised, smiling. “How does your mother say it?”

“She says numbuh one.”

Luter chuckled. “Then she’s learned a little English.”

After he had gone to the bathroom, David went into his bedroom, and undressed and got into his night-gown.

Luter looked in. “All right?” he asked.

“Yes,” he answered climbing into bed.

Luter shut the door.

Darkness was different without his mother near. People were different too.

VI

IN THE bedroom where she had gone to tuck away the tablecloth, David heard the closet drawer chuckle softly close. And then,

“Alas!” came his mother’s voice. “He has forgotten it.” She reappeared, in her extended hand a parcel. “The present he was going to give them. He goes empty-handed now.” She set it down on a chair. “I must remember to give it to him to-morrow, or perhaps he’ll remember and return.”

That Luter might come back disturbed David, he pushed the thought away. He had been looking forward to this evening when he would have her to himself until bedtime. It was the second theatre night. His father had gone alone.

She lifted the kettle of water from the stove, bore it to the sink and poured the steaming water into the basin.

She turned to look at him. “The way you watch me,” she said with a laugh, “makes me feel as if I were performing black magic. It is only dishes I’m washing.” And after a pause. “Would you like another little brother?” she asked slyly, “or a little sister.”

“No,” he answered soberly.

“It would be better for you, if you had,” she teased. “It would give you something else to look at beside your mother.”

“I don’t want to look at anything else.”

“Your mother had eight brothers and sisters,” she reminded him. “One of them may come here some day, one of my sisters, your Aunt Bertha — would you like that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d like her,” she assured him. “She’s very funny. She has red hair and a sharp tongue. And there’s no one she can’t mimic. She’s not so very fat, yet in the summertime, the sweat pours down her in torrents. I don’t know why that is. I have seen men sweat like that, but never a woman.”

“I get all wet under here in the summer.” He pointed to his arm pits.

“Yes,” said his mother with peculiar emphasis, “she did too. They told her once — but you never saw a bear?”

“In a book. There were three bears.”

“Yes, you told me about them. Well, in Europe the gypsies — gypsies are men and women, dark people. They roam all over the world.”

“Why?”

“It pleases them.”

“You asked me about a bear.”

“Yes. Sometimes these gypsies take a bear along with them wherever they go.”

“Do they eat porridge?” He had said the last word in English.

“What’s porridge?”

“My teacher said it was oatmeal and farina, you give it to me in the morning.”

“Yes, yes. You told me. But I’m not sure. I know they like apples. Still if your teacher—”

“And what did the bear do?”

“The bear danced. The gypsies sang and shook the tambourine and the bear danced.”

David hugged himself with delight. “Who made him?”

“The gypsies. They earned their money that way. When the bear was tired, people threw pennies in their tambourine— Now! I was telling you about your aunt. Someone told her that if she crept up behind the bear and rubbed her hands on his fur, she would stop sweating under her palms. And so one day while the bear was dancing—”

She stopped speaking. David had heard it too: a step outside the door. A moment later someone knocked. A voice.

“It is only I–Luter.”

With an exclamation of surprise, she opened the door. Luter came in.

“I went away without my head,” he said apologetically. “I’ve forgotten my gift.”

“It’s a pity you had to take all that trouble again,” she said sympathetically. “You left it in the bedroom.” She picked up the parcel from the chair.

“Yes, I know,” he answered, resting it on the table. He looked at his watch. “I’m afraid it’s too late for me to go now. I couldn’t get there before nine and then how long can one stay, an hour.”

David was secretly annoyed to see him sit down.

Luter opened his coat and with an expression of anxious indecision on his face regarded David’s mother. His eyes had a brilliance and restlessness greater than usual. David was again aware of the difficult curves of the man’s face.

“Take your coat off,” she suggested. “It’s warm here.”

“If you don’t mind,” he slipped it from his shoulders, “Now that I have nowhere to go.”

“Won’t they be disappointed when they see you’re not coming?”

“No, they’ll know that the black hour hasn’t seized me.” He laughed. “Please go on with your work, don’t let me interfere.”

“I was merely washing some dishes,” she said. “I’ve finished now, except for these pots.” She picked up the red and white can of powder in the corner of the small shelf above the sink, shook some of it into a pot, and rubbed the inside vigorously with a dish rag, stooping over with the effort.

David, who was leaning from the side of his chair could see Luter and his mother at the same time. Absorbed in watching his mother, he would have paid little attention to Luter, but the sudden oblique shifting of Luter’s eyes toward himself drew his own gaze toward them. Luter, his eyes narrowed by a fixed yawn, was staring at his mother, at her hips. For the first time, David was aware of how her flesh, confined by the skirt, formed separate molds against it. He felt suddenly bewildered, struggling with something in his mind that would not become a thought.

“You women,” said Luter sympathetically, “especially when you marry must work like slaves.”

“It isn’t quite so bad as all that. Despite the ancient proverb.”

“No,” said Luter meditatively, “anything may be lived. But to labor without thanks that’s bitter.”

“True. And to labor even with thanks, what comes of it?”

“Well,” he uncrossed his legs, “nothing comes of anything, not even millionaires, but esteem gives the trumpeter breath — esteem and gifts naturally.”

“Then I have my esteem,” she laughed, straightening up and turning around as Luter arranged his mouth more firmly. “I have esteem that grows.” She regarded David with an amused smile.

“Yes,” said Luter with a sigh, “but everyone can have that kind of esteem. Still, it’s good to have children.” And then earnestly, “Do you know I have never seen a child cling so to his mother.”

David found himself resenting Luter’s comment.

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” she agreed.

“I think so,” he said warmly. “Why, my cousin’s children — the very relative I was going to visit to-night — they are home only when they sleep and eat. At night after dinner, they are up in some neighbor’s house,” he lifted his hand to emphasize the point, “playing with other children the whole evening.”

“There are other children in the house,” answered his mother. “But he seems to make friends with none. It has only been once or twice,” she turned to David, “that you have been in Yussie’s house or he here, has it not?”

David nodded uneasily.

“He’s a strange child!” said Luter with conviction.

His mother laughed condoningly.

“Though very intelligent,” he assured her.

There was a pause while she emptied the dishpan into the sink; the grey water muttered down the drain.

“He looks very much like you,” said Luter with the hesitance of careful appraisal. “He has the same brown eyes you have, very fine eyes, and the same white skin. Where did you get that white German skin?” he asked David playfully.

“I don’t know.” The man’s intimacy embarrassed him. He wished Luter would go away.

“And both of you have very small hands. Has he not small hands for a child his size? Like those of a prince’s. Perhaps he will be a doctor some day.”

“If he has more than hands.”

“Yes,” Luter agreed, “still I don’t think he’ll need labor for his bread like his father, or even like myself.”

“I hope not, but only God knows.”

“Isn’t it strange,” he said suddenly, “how Albert has seized hold of the theatre? Like a drunkard his dram. Who would have believed it?”

“It means a great deal to him. I could hear him beside me gnashing his teeth at a certain character.”

Luter laughed. “Albert is a good man, even though the other workers think him odd. It is I who keep the peace, you know.” He laughed again.

“Yes, I do know, and I’m grateful to you for it.”

“Oh it’s nothing. A word here, a word there smooths everything. Truth is, I might not have been so ready to protect him, if I hadn’t known you, that is, if I hadn’t come here and been one of you. But now I take up his interest as though he were my own brother. It is not always easy with so strange a man.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Not at all,” said Luter. “You have repaid me. Both of you.”

Picking up several dry utensils she crossed the kitchen to the pantry. There she pulled open the door, bent over and hung them on the nails inside. Luter’s head tilted, his gaze flitting to her bosom. He cleared his throat with a pecking sound.

“But say what you will, Albert is — what shall I say, a nervous man — till you know him, of course. But I can see why you’ve never gone out with him anywhere,” he ended sympathetically. “You’re a proud woman with a great deal of feeling, no?”

“No more than anyone else. What has that to do with it?”

“I’ll tell you. You see, Albert, well—” he smiled and scratched his neck, puzzled. “Even in the street, he behaves so strangely. You know better than I do. He seems to look for jeers in the faces of passersby. And when you go with him — I go with him every night — it’s as though he finds some kind of pleasure walking behind a cripple or a drunkard or any kind of freakish person — I don’t know what! One would think it made him feel safer. He wants people on the street to look at someone else. Anyone else, instead of himself. Even a water wagon or street gamblers give him this odd satisfaction. But why do I talk this way when I like him so much.” He paused and laughed quietly.

David’s mother looked at the dish towel, but made no answer.

“Yes,” he chuckled, hurriedly. “I like especially the way he never speaks of Tysmenicz without leading in the cattle he once tended.”

“Well, there weren’t many things he loved more in the old land.”

“But to love cattle so,” Luter smiled. “All I thought of when I saw a cow was that it gave milk. Now when I think of Europe, and of my hamlet, the first thought that comes to me, just as his first thought is a cow or a prize bull, my first thought is of the peasant women. You understand?”

“Naturally, each has his memories.” Having placed the last dishes in the closet, she drew a chair beside David’s and sat down. On one side of the table sat Luter, on the other David and his mother.

“Exactly,” said Luter, “Each one remembers what appealed to him, and I remember the peasant wenches. Weren’t they a striking lot, in their tight checked vests and their dozen petticoats?” He shook his head regretfully. “One never sees the like here. It’s a scanty soil from what one sees of it in Brooklyn and its women are spare. But in Sorvik they grew like oaks. They had blonde hair, their eyes blazed. And when they smiled with their white teeth and blue eyes, who could resist them? It was enough to set your blood on fire. The men never dazzled you that way?” he asked after a pause.

“No, I never paid much attention to them.”

“Well, you wouldn’t — you were a good Jewish daughter. Besides, the men were a worthless lot, vacant lumps with great shoulders and a nose on them like a split pea. Their women were wasted on them. You know,” his voice was very earnest, “the only woman I know who reminds me of those girls, is you.”

She reddened, threw back her head and laughed, “Me? I’m only a good Jewish daughter.”

“I am not accusing you of anything else, but never since I have been in America have I seen a woman that so reminded me of them. Their lips were so full, so ripe, as if to be kissed.”

She smiled curiously with one cheek. “God knows, there must be enough Austrian peasants even in this land. If Jews were let in, surely no one would bar the Slovaks.”

Luter looked down at the ring he was twisting around his finger. “Yes, I suppose so. I have seen a few of them, but none I cared much about.”

“You better look about a little more then.”

Luter’s face grew strangely sober, the lines about his nostrils deepened. Without lifting his head, his eyes slanted up at David’s mother. “Perhaps I can stop looking.”

She laughed outright. “Don’t be foolish, Mr. Luter!”

“Mr. Luter!” He looked annoyed for a moment, then shrugged and smiled. “Now that you know me so well, why use the formal still?”

“Apparently I don’t know you so well.”

“It takes a little time,” he admitted. His gaze roved about the room and came to rest on David. “Perhaps you would like some refreshments?”

“No, but if you do, I can make some tea.”

“No, thanks,” he said solicitously, “don’t take the trouble. But I know what you would like — a little ice cream.”

“Please don’t bother.”

“Why, it’s no trouble. The young one there will go down for us.” He drew out a coin. “Here, you know where the candy store is. Go get some tutti frutti and chocolate. You like it don’t you?”

With troubled eyes David looked first at Luter, then at the coin. Beneath the table a hand gently pressed his thigh. His mother! What did she want?

“I don’t like it,” he faltered. “I don’t like ice cream.”

The fingers of the same hand tapped his knees ever so lightly. He had said the right thing.

“No? Tutti frutti ice cream? Candy then, you like that?”

“No.”

“I think it’s a little too late for him to have either,” said his mother.

“Well, I guess we won’t buy any then, since he’s going to bed soon.” Luter looked at his watch. “This is just the time I put him to bed last time, wasn’t it, my David?”

“Yes,” he hesitated fearful of blundering.

“I suppose he’s sleepy now,” Luter suggested encouragingly.

“He doesn’t look sleepy,” his mother, smoothed the hair back from his brow. “His eyes are still wide and bright.”

“I’m not sleepy.” That, at least, was true. He had never been so strangely stirred, never had he felt so near an abyss.

“We’ll let you stay up awhile then.”

There was a short space of silence. Luter frowned, emitted a faint smacking sound from the side of his mouth. “You don’t seem to have any of the usual womanly instincts.”

“Don’t I? It seems to me that I keep pretty closely to the well-trodden path.”

“Curiosity, for instance.”

“I had already lost that even before my marriage.”

“You only imagine it. But don’t misunderstand me, I merely meant curiosity about the package I left behind. It must be clear to you that I didn’t get what’s in it for my relatives’ sake.”

“Well, you’d better give it to them now.”

“Not so soon.” And when she didn’t answer, he shrugged, arose from the chair and got into his coat. “Hate me for it if I say it again, but you’re a comely woman. This time though I won’t forget my package.” He reached for the door-knob, turned. “But I may still come for dinner tomorrow?”

She laughed. “If you still haven’t tired of my cooking.”

“Not yet.” And chuckling. “Good-night. Good-night, little one. It must be a joy to have such a son.” He went out.

With a wry smile on her lips, she listened to the sound of his retreating steps. Then her brow puckered in disdain. “All are called men!” She sat for a moment gazing before her with troubled eyes. Presently her brow cleared; she tilted her head and peered into David’s eyes. “Are you worried about anything? Your look is so intent.”

“I don’t like him,” he confessed.

“Well, he’s gone now,” she said reassuringly. Let’s forget about him. We won’t even tell father he came, will we?”

“No.”

“Let’s go to bed then, it grows late.”

VII

ANOTHER week had passed. The two men had just gone off together. With something of an annoyed laugh, his mother went to the door and stood fingering the catch of the lock. Finally she lifted it. The hidden tongue sprang into its groove.

“Oh, what nonsense!” She unlocked it again, looked up at the light and then at the windows.

David felt himself growing uneasy. Why did Thursdays have to roll around so soon? He was beginning to hate them as much as he did Sundays.

“Why must they make proof of everything before they’re satisfied?” Her lips formed and unformed a frown. “Well, there’s nothing to do but go. I’ll wash those dishes later.” She opened the door and turned out the light.

Bewildered, David followed her into the cold, gas-lit hallway.

“We’re going upstairs to Mrs. Mink.” She cast a hurried look over the bannister. “You can play with your friend Yussie.”

David wondered why she needed to bring that up. He hadn’t said anything about wanting to play with Yussie. In fact, he didn’t even feel like it. Why didn’t she just say she was running away, instead of making him feel guilty. He knew whom she was looking for when she looked over the bannister.

His mother knocked at the door. It was opened. Mrs. Mink stood on the threshold. At the sight of his mother, she beamed with pleasure.

“Hollo, Mrs. Schearl! Hollo! Hollo! Comm een!” She scratched her lustreless, black hair excitedly.

“I hope you don’t find my coming here untimely,” his mother smiled apologetically.

“No, as I live!” Mrs. Mink lapsed into Yiddish. “You’re wholly welcome! A guest — the rarest I have!” She dragged a chair forward. “Do sit down.”

Mrs. Mink was a flat-breasted woman with a sallow skin and small features. She had narrow shoulders and meager arms, and David always wondered when he saw her how the thin skin on her throat managed to hold back the heavy, bulging veins.

“I thought I would never have the pleasure of seeing you in my house,” she continued. “It was only the other day that I was telling our landlady — Look, Mrs. Schearl and I are neighbors, but we know nothing of each other. I dare not ask her up into my house. I’m afraid to. She looks so proud.”

“I, proud?”

“Yes, not proud, noble! You always walk with your head in the air — so! And even when you go to market, you dress like a lady. I’ve watched you often from the window, and I’ve said to my man— Come here! Look, that’s her! Do you see how tall she is! He is not home now, my picture of a spouse, he works late in the jewelry store. I know he will regret missing you.”

David found himself quickly tiring of Mrs. Mink’s rapid stream of words, and looking about saw that Annie was observing him. Yussie was nowhere to be seen. He tugged his mother’s hand, and when she bent over, asked for him.

“Yussie?” Mrs. Mink interrupted herself long enough to say. “He’s asleep.”

“Don’t wake him,” said his mother.

“That’s all right. I’ve got to send him to the delicatessen for some bread soon. Yussele!” she called.

His only answer was a resentful yawn.

“He’s coming soon,” she said reassuringly.

In a few minutes, Yussie came out. One of his stockings had fallen, and he trod on it, shuffling sleepily. He blinked, eyed David’s mother suspiciously a moment, and then sidled over to David, “W’y’s yuh mudder hea?”

“She jost came.”

“W’y’d she comm?”

“I donno.”

At this point Annie hobbled over. “Pull yuh stockin’ op, yuh slob!”

Obediently Yussie hoisted up his stocking. David could not help noticing how stiff and bare the white stocking hung behind the brace on Annie’s own leg.

“So yuh gonna stay by us?” asked Yussie eagerly.

“Yea.”

“H’ray! C’mon inna fron’room.” He grabbed David’s arm. “I godda—”

But David had stopped. “I’m goin’ inna fron’ room, mama.”

Turning from the chattering Mrs. Mink, David’s mother smiled at him in slight distress and nodded.

“Waid’ll I show yuh wod we god,” Yussie dragged him into the frontroom.

While Yussie babbled on excitedly, David stared about him. He had never been in Yussie’s front room before; Annie had barred the way as if it were inviolable ground. Now he saw a room which was illuminated by a gas lamp overhead and crowded with dark and portly furniture. In the middle of the floor stood a round glass-topped table and about it chairs of the same dark stain. A china closet hugged one wall, a bureau another, a dressing table a third, cabinets clogged the corners. All were bulky, all rested on the same kind of scrolled and finical paw. On the wall space above the furniture hung two pairs of yellowed portraits, two busts of wrinkled women with unnatural masses of black hair, and two busts of old men who wore ringlets under their skull caps and beards on their chins. With an expression of bleak hostility in their flat faces, they looked down at David. Barring the way to the window squatted a swollen purple plush chair, embroidered with agitated parrots of various hues. A large vapid doll with gold curls and a violet dress sat on the glass top of a cabinet. After his own roomy frontroom with its few sticks of furniture, David not only felt bewildered, he felt oddly warm.

“It’s inna closet in my modder’s bedroom.” Yussie continued. “Jost wait, I’ll show yuh.”

He disappeared into the darkness of the adjoining bedroom. David heard him open a door, rummage about for a minute. When he returned, he bore in his hand a curious steel cage.

“Yuh know wat dis’s fuh?” he held it up to David’s eyes.

David examined it more closely, “No. Wot d’yuh do wit’ it?”

“It c’n catch rats, dot’s wot yuh do wit’ it. See dis little door? De rat gizz in like dot.” He opened a thin metal door at the front of the cage. “Foist yuh put sompin ove’ hea, and on ’iz liddle hook. An’ nen nuh rat gizzin. Dey uz zuh big rat inna house, yuh could hear him at night, so my fodder bought dis, an’ my mudder put in schmaltz f’om de meat, and nuh rat comes in, an’ inna mawningk, I look unner by de woshtob, an’ooh — he wuz dere, runnin’ dis way like dot.” Yussie waved the cage about excitedly, “An I calls my fodder an’ he gets op f’om de bed an’ he fills op de woshtob and eeh! duh rat giz all aroun’ in it, in nuh watuh giz all aroun’. An’ nen he stops. An nen my fodder takes it out and he put it in nuh bag and trew it out f’om de winner. Boof! he fell inna guttah. Ooh wotta rat he wuz. My mudder wuz runnin’ aroun’, an aroun’ an after, my fodder kept on spittin’ in nuh sink. Kcha!”

David backed away in disgust.

“See, I tol’ yuh I had sumtin tuh show yuh. See, like dot it closes.” He snapped the little, metal door. “We didn’t hea’ it, cause ev’ybody wuz sleepin’. Rats on’y come out innuh da’k, w’en yuh can’t see ’em, and yuh know w’ea dey comin’ f’om, dey comin’ f’om de cellah. Dot’s w’ea dey live innuh cellah — all rats.”

The cellar! That explained it. That moment of fear when he turned the bottom landing before he went out into the street. He would be doubly terrified now.

“Wotta yuh doin?” They started at the intruding voice. It was Annie coming in. Her face was writhed back in disgust.

“Eee! Yuh stoopid lummox! Put it away. I’ll call mama!”

“Aaa, lemme alone.”

“Yuh gonna put it away?” she squealed.

“Aa, shit on you,” muttered Yussie sullenly. “Can’t do nuttin’.” Nevertheless, he carried the cage back to the bedroom.

“W’y d’yuh let ’im show it tuh yuh fuh?” she demanded angrily of David. “Such a dope!”

“I didn’ know wot it wuz,” he stammered.

“Yuh didn’ know wot it wuz? Yurra lummox too!”

“Now g’wan.” Yussie returned from the bedroom. “Leave us alone.”

“I will not,” she snapped. “Dis is my frontroom.”

“He don’ wanna play witchoo. He’s my frien!”

“So who wants him!”

“So don’ butt in.”

“Pooh!” She plumped herself in a chair. The steel brace clicked disagreeably against the wood.

David wished she could wear long pants like a man.

“Comm on ove’ by de winder,” Yussie guided him through a defile in the furniture. “We mus’ be a fireman. We c’n put out de fire inna house.” He indicated the bureau. “Yuh wanna?”

“Awrigh’.”

“An’ we c’n slide down duh pipe an’ we c’n have a fiuh-ingine, an’ nen I’ll be duh drivuh. Yuh wanna?”

“Yea.”

“Den let’s make fiuh hats. Waid, I’ll get some paper inna kitchen.” He ran off.

Annie slid off the chair and came over. “Wot class yuh in?”

“1A.”

“I’m in 4A,” she said loftily. “I skipped a’reddy. An’ now I’m duh sma’test one in my class.”

David was impressed.

“My teacher’s name is Miss McCardy. She’s duh bes’ teacher inna whole school. She gave me A. A. A.”

By this time Yussie had returned bearing several sheets of newspaper.

“Wotta ya gonna do?” she demanded.

“Wotta you care!” he defied her. “We’ gonna be fiuhmen.”

“Yuh can’t!”

“No?” Yussie inquired angrily, “Why can’ we?”

“Cause yuh can’t, dat’s w’y! Cause yu’ll scratch op all de foinichuh.”

“We won’ scratch nuttin’!” stormed Yussie whirling the newspaper about in frustration. “We gonna play.”

“Yuh can’t!”

“We will!”

“I’ll give yuh in a minute,” she advanced threateningly.

“Aa! Wodda yuh wan’ us tuh play?”

“Yuh c’n play lottos.”

“I don’ wanna play lottos,” he whined.

“Den play school den.”

“I don’ wanna play school.”

“Den don’ play nuttin!” she said with finality.

A large bubble of saliva swelled from Yussie’s lips as he squeezed his face down to blubber. “I’ll tell mama on you!”

“Tell! She’ll give yuh a smack!” She whirled threateningly on David. “Wadda you wanna play?”

“I don’ know,” he drew back.

“Doncha know no games?” she fumed.

“I–I know tag an’ I know, I know hide an’ gussee’.”

Yussie revived. “Let’s play hide an’ gussee’.”

“No!”

“You too!” he coaxed desperately. “C’mon, you too.”

Annie thought it over.

“C’mon I’ll be it!” And immediately, he leaned his face against the edge of a bureau and began counting. “G’wan hide!” he broke off.

“Wait!” shrilled Annie, hopping off. “Count twenny!”

David scurried behind the arm chair.

He was found last and accordingly was “it” next. In a little while the game grew very exciting. Since David was somewhat unfamiliar with the arrangement of the house, it chanced that several times he hid with Yussie when Annie was it and with Annie when Yussie was it. They had crouched together in barricaded corners and behind the bedroom door.

However, just as the game was reaching its greatest pitch, Mrs. Mink’s voice suddenly called out from the kitchen.

“Yussele! Yussele, my treasure, come here!”

“Aa!” from somewhere came Yussie’s exasperated bleat.

David, who was “it” at the time, stopped counting and turned around.

“Yussie!” Mrs. Mink cried again, but this time shriller.

“Can’t do nuttin’,” complained Yussie, crawling out from under the bureau. “Waddayuh want?” he bellowed.

“Come here. I want you to go down stairs for a minute.”

Annie, evidently aware that the game was over for the time being, came out of the adjoining bedroom. “He has to go down?”

“Yea,” diffidently. “Fuh bread.”

“Den we can’t play.”

“No. I’m gonna go back tuh my modder.”

“Stay hea,” she commanded, “We gonna play. Waid’ll Yussie comes back.”

The voices from the kitchen indicated that Yussie had been persuaded. He reappeared, dressed in coat and hat. “I’m goin’ down,” he announced, and went out again. An uncomfortable pause ensued.

“We can’t play till he comes back,” David reminded her.

“Yes, we can.”

“Wot?”

“Wotcha want.”

“I don’t know wot.”

“Yuh know wot.”

“Wot?”

“Yuh know,” she said mysteriously.

That was the game then. David congratulated himself on having discovered its rules so quickly.

“Yea, I know,” he answered in the same tone of mystery.

“Yea?” she peered at him eagerly.

“Yea!” he peered at her in the same way.

“Yuh wanna?”

“Yea!”

“Yuh wanna den?”

“Yea, I wanna.” It was the easiest game he had ever played. Annie was not so frightening after all.

“W’ea?”

“W’ea?” he repeated.

“In the bedroom,” she whispered.

But she was really going!

“C’mon,” she motioned, tittering.

He followed. This was puzzling.

She shut the door: he stood bewildered in the gloom.

“C’mon,” she took his hand. “I’ll show yuh.”

He could hear her groping in the dark. The sound of an unseen door opening. The closet door.

“In hea,” she whispered.

What was she going to do? His heart began to race.

She drew him in, shut the door. Darkness, immense and stale, the reek of moth balls threading it.

Her breathing in the narrow space was loud as a gust, swooping down and down again. His heart throbbed in his ears. She moved toward him, nudged him gently with the iron slat of her brace. He was frightened. Before the pressure of her body, he retreated slightly. Something rolled beneath his feet. What? He knew instantly, and recoiled in disgust — the trap!

“Sh!” she warned. “Take me aroun’.” She groped for his hands.

He put his arms about her.

“Now let’s kiss.”

His lips touched hers, a muddy spot in vast darkness.

“How d’you play bad?” she asked.

“Bad? I don’ know,” he quavered.

“Yuh wan’ me to show how I?”

He was silent, terrified.

“Yuh must ask me,” she said. “G’wan ask me.”

“Wot?”

“Yuh must say, Yuh wanna play bad? Say it!”

He trembled. “Yuh wanna play bad?

“Now, you said it,” she whispered. “Don’ forget, you said it.”

By the emphasis of her words, David knew he had crossed some awful threshold.

“Will yuh tell?”

“No,” he answered weakly. The guilt was his.

“Yuh swear?”

“I swear.”

“Yuh know w’ea babies comm from?”

“N-no.”

“From de knish.”

— Knish?

“Between de legs. Who puts id in is de poppa. De poppa’s god de petzel. Yaw de poppa.” She giggled stealthily and took his hand. He could feel her guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm. Revolted, he drew back.

“Yuh must!” she insisted, tugging his hand. “Yuh ast me!”

“No!”

“Put yuh han’ in my knish,” she coaxed. “Jus’ once.”

“No!”

“I’ll hol’ yuh petzel.” She reached down.

“No!” His flesh was crawling.

“Den take me ’round again.”

“No! No! Lemme oud!” he pushed her away.

“Waid. Yussie’ll t’ink we’re hidin’.”

“No! I don’ wanna!” He had raised his voice to a shout.

“So go!” she gave him an angry push.

But David had already opened the door and was out.

She grabbed him as he crossed the bedroom. “If you tell!” she whispered venomously. “W’ea yuh goin’?”

“I’m goin tuh my mamma!”

“Stay hea! I’ll kill yuh, yuh go inside!” She shook him.

He wanted to cry.

“An’ don’ cry,” she warned fiercely, and then strove desperately to engage him, “Stay hea an’ I’ll tell yuh a story. I’ll let yuh play fiuhman. Yuh c’n have a hat. Yuh c’n climb on de foinichuh. Stay hea!”

He stood still, watching her rigidly, half hypnotized by her fierce, frightened eyes. The outer door was opened. Yussie’s voice in the kitchen.

A moment later, he came in, breathlessly stripping off his coat.

“I god a penny,” he crowed.

“Yuh c’n play fiuhman, if yuh wan’,” she said severely.

“No foolin’? Yeh? H’ray! C’mon, Davy!”

But David held back. “I don’ wanna play.”

“C’mon,” Yussie grabbed a sheet of newspaper and thrust it into his hands. “We mus’ make a hat.”

“G’wan make a hat,” commanded Annie.

Cowed and almost sniffling, David began folding the paper into a hat.

He played listlessly, one eye always on Annie who watched his every move. Yussie was disgusted with him.

“David!” his mother’s voice calling him.

Deliverance at last! With a cry of relief, he tore off the fireman’s hat, ran down the frontroom stairs into the kitchen. His mother was standing; she seemed about to leave. He pressed close to her side.

“We must go now,” she said smiling down at him. “Say good night to your friends.”

“Good night,” he mumbled.

“Please don’t hurry off,” said Mrs. Mink. “It’s been such a pleasure to have you here.”

“I really must go. It’s past his bed time.”

David was in the van stealthily tugging his mother toward the door.

“This hour I have been in heaven,” said Mrs. Mink. “You must come often! I am never busy.”

“Many thanks.”

They hurried down the drafty stairs.

“I heard you playing in the frontroom,” she said. “You must have enjoyed your visit.”

She unlocked the door, lit the gas lamp.

“Dear God! The room has grown cold.” And picking up the poker, she crouched before the stove, shook down the dull embers behind the grate. “I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. At least one of us has skimmed a little pleasure out of this evening! What folly! And that Mrs. Mink. If I had known she talked so much, drays could not have dragged me up there!” She lifted the coal scuttle, shook some coal vehemently into the stove. “Her tongue spun like a bobbin on a sewing machine — and she sewed nothing. It’s unbelievable! I began to see motes before my eyes.” She shook her head impatiently and put down the coal scuttle. “My son, do you know your mother’s a fool? But you’re tired, aren’t you? Let me put you to bed.”

Kneeling down before him, she began unbuttoning his shoes. When she had pulled his stockings off, she lifted his legs, examined them a moment, then kissed each one. “Praise God, your body is sound! How I pity that poor child upstairs!”

But she didn’t know as he knew how the whole world could break into a thousand little pieces, all buzzing, all whining, and no one hearing them and no one seeing them except himself.

VIII

WHEN David awoke the next morning, it seemed to him that he had been lying in bed a long while with eyes open but without knowing who or where he was. Memory had never been so tardy in returning. He could almost feel his brain fill up like a bottle under a slow tap. Reluctant antennae groped feebly into the past. Where? What? One by one the shuttles stirred, awoke, knit morning to night, night to evening. Annie! Oh! Desperately he shook his head, but could not shake the memory out.

The window.… Snow still falling through the dull light of the alley, banked whitely against the sill, encroaching on the pane. David stared a while at the sinking patterns of the flakes. They fell with slow simplicity if you watched them, swiftly and devious if you looked beyond. Their monotonous descent gave him an odd feeling of being lifted higher and higher; he went floating until he was giddy. He shut his eyes.

From the street somewhere, came the frosty ring of a shovel scraping the stony sidewalk, a remote and drowsy sound.

All this stir when the world seemed trying to sleep, saddened him. Why did anyone have to clear away the snow; why did anyone disturb it? He would rather the snow were on the ground all year. The thin sound of the shovel gave him a feeling of sluggish resentment. He drew his legs up and bent his head toward his knees. Warm bed-clothes, the odor of sleep.

He would have dozed again, but the door opened. His mother came in and sat down at the edge of the bed.

“Asleep?” she asked, then bent down and kissed him. “It’s time to get up for school.” And sighing, she threw back the bed-clothes, and pivoted him to a sitting posture on the bed. He whimpered drowsily, then rose, shivering when his feet touched the cold floor and followed her. The kitchen was warm. She slipped his night gown from over his head and helped him dress. When he was washed and combed, he sat down to breakfast. He ate listlessly and without relish.

“You don’t seem to be very hungry?” she inquired. “You’ve hardly touched the oatmeal. Would you like more milk?”

“No. I’m not hungry.”

“An egg?”

He shook his head.

“I shouldn’t have kept you up so late. You look weary. Do you remember the strange dream you had last night?”

“Yes.”

“How did such a strange dream come to you?” she mused. “A woman with a child who turned loathsome, a crowd of people following a black-bird. I don’t understand it. But my, how you screamed!”

Why did she have to remind him of it again. The vigil afterwards waiting for sleep. Annie!

“Why did you kick the table so?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it a growing pain?” she laughed. “But they say those happen only in sleep. Are you awake?” She looked at the clock. “Just a little more milk?”

“No.”

“You’ll have more at lunch then,” she warned. “But it’s time now you were going.” She fetched his leggings and kneeling down buttoned them on. “Shall I go with you?”

“I can go by myself.”

“Perhaps you ought to wait for Yussie or his sister.”

The very thought made him shudder inwardly. He knew he would run from them if he met them. He shook his head.

“Will you go right into the school and not stay too long in the snow?”

“Yes.” He let down the furry ear-laps of his cap as he put it on. His books were on the wash-tub.

“Good-bye, then,” she stooped to kiss him. “Such an indifferent kiss! I don’t think you love me this morning.”

But David offered no other. He took one step through the door, started with fear, remembering. He turned. “Mama, will you leave the door open till — till I’m gone — till you hear me down-stairs?”

“Child! What’s wrong with you? Very well, I will. Does that dream still hover in your mind?”

“Yes,” he felt relieved that she had given him an excuse.

“You had better go now. I’ll wait in the door-way.”

Feeling ashamed of himself and yet not a little supported by her presence in the doorway, David hurried out. At the bottom of the stairs the cellar door was still shut. He eyed it with horror, his heart quickening in his bosom.

“Mama?” he called.

“Yes.”

He sprang from the steps, three at a time, more than he had ever tried before, stumbled to his knees, dropping his strap of books, but the next moment shot to his feet again, and sped like a hunted thing to the pale light of the doorway.

The silent white street waited for him, snow-drifts where the curb was. Footfalls silent. Before the houses, the newly swept areas of the sidewalks, black, were greying again. Flakes cold on cheek, quickening. Narrow-eyed, he peered up. Black overhead the flakes were, black till they sank below a housetop. Then suddenly white. Why? A flake settled on his eye-lash; he blinked, tearing with the wet chill, lowered his head. Snow trodden down by passing feet into crude, slippery scales. The railings before basements gliding back beside him, white pipes of snow upon them. He scooped one up as he went. Icy, setting the blood tingling, it gathered before the plow of his palm. He pressed it into a ball, threw it from one hand to the other until he dropped it.

He turned the first corner at the end of the street, turned the second. Would it be there again? He quickened his pace. It was still hanging there beside the doorway. This was the third day he had seen it, and each time he had forgotten to ask what it meant. What could it mean? The green leaves were half concealed in snow; even the purple ribbon was covered. The poor white flowers looked frozen. He stared at them thoughtfully and passed on.

He turned the last corner. Voices of children. School a little ways off, on the other side of the street.

If he saw Annie there, what would he do? Look away. Walk by—

Must cross. Before him at the corner, children were crossing a beaten path in the snow. Beside him, the untrodden white of the gutter. He stopped. Here was a place to cross. Not a single footprint, only a wagon rut. Better not. The ridge of snow near the curb was almost as tall as himself. But none had crossed before. It would be his own, all his own path. Yes. He took a running jump, only partly cleared the first ridge, landed in snow almost as high as his knees. Behind him several voices called out, jeering, but he plunged forward, plunged forward to the lower level. Shouldn’t have done it! He would be all covered with it now, wet. But how miraculously clean it was, all about him, whiter than anything he knew, whiter than anything, whiter. The second ridge was packed harder than the first; he climbed up, almost sank, jumped for safety to the other side, hastily brushed himself off. Sidewalk snow, riddled with salt, tramped down by the feet of children, reddened with ashes, growing dirtier as it neared the school.

At the sound of laughter, he looked up. In front of him, straddled two boys, vying with each other, each squirting urine as far ahead as he could. The water sank in a ragged channel, steaming in the snow, yellowing at the margins.

Sidewalk snow never stayed white. The school door. He entered.

Walk by if he saw her, hurry by.…

IX

THE three o’clock bell sounded at last. Dismissed, he hurried through the milling crowd of noisy children. He had seen neither Yussie nor Annie, and now, as at lunch time, he darted ahead of the other children for fear of being overtaken by either.

It had stopped snowing, and although clouds still dulled the light, the air was warmer than it had been in the morning. Beside the curb, snow-forts squatted, half built during the lunch recess, waiting completion. A long sliding-pond stretched like a black ribbon in the gutter. Where the snow had been swept from the sidewalks, treacherous grey patches of ice tenaciously clung.

* * *

He went as swiftly as he could, picking his way. From time to time, he glanced hastily over his shoulder. No, they weren’t there. He had outstripped them. He turned a corner, stopped in midstride, staring at the strange sight before him; cautiously he drew near.

A line of black carriages listed away from the snow-banked curb. He had seen such carriages before. But what was that in front of the house, that curious one, square and black with windows in its sides? Black plumes on the horses. Why those small groups of people beside the doorway whispering so quietly and craning their necks to look inside the hallway? Above the street, in all the nearby houses, windows were open, men and women were leaning out. In one of these a woman gesticulated to some one behind her. A man came forward, furtively grinning, patted her jutting hips and wedged into the space beside her. What were they all staring at? What was coming out of that house? Suddenly he remembered. The flowers had been there! Yes he knew the doorway. White, flattened pillars. Flowers! What? He looked about for someone to ask, but he could see no one his own age. Near one of the carriages, stood a small group of men, all dressed alike in long black coats and tall hats. The drivers. They alone seemed unperturbed, yet even they spoke quietly. Perhaps he could hear what they said. He sidled over, straining his ears.

“An’ wattayuh t’ink he had de crust to tell me?” A man with a raw, weathered face was speaking, smoke from his cigarette unwreathing his words. “He siz, wadjuh stop fer? Now wouldn’t dat give yuh de shits?”

He stared at the others for affirmation. They nodded agreement with their eyes.

Vindicated, the man continued, but more slowly and with greater emphasis. “His pole smacks into my hack, and he squawks wadjuh stop fer? I coulda spit in his mug, de donkey!”

“At’s twiset now, ain’ it?” asked another.

“Twiset, my pudd’n,” retorted the first in wrathful contempt. “It’s de toid time. Wuzn’t Jeff de foist one he rammed, an’ wuzn’t Toiner de secon’? An’ yestiddy me!”

“Hey!” Another man nudged his neighbor abruptly. “Dere goes de row-boat!”

Hastily throwing their cigarettes away, they scattered, and each one swung himself up to his box on the carriage.

More confused now than before, David drew near the doorway. A man in a tall black hat had just come out and was standing on the step looking solicitously into the hallway. A hush fell on the crowd; they huddled together as if for protection. Terror seemed to emanate from the hallway. At a sign from the man in the tall hat, the doors in back of the strange carriage were thrown open. Inside the gloomy interior metal glimmered, tasseled curtains shut out the light. Suddenly out of the hallway a scraping sound and slow shuffling of feet. A soft moan came from the crowd.

“He’s coming!” someone whispered, craning her neck.

A sense of desolation. A fear.

Two men came out, laboring under the front-end of a huge black box, then two more at the other end. Red-faced, they trod carefully down the steps, advanced toward the carriage, rested one end of the box on the carriage floor.

That was—! Yes! That was! He suddenly understood. Mama said — Inside! Yes! Man! Inside! His flesh went cold with terror.

“Easy,” cautioned the man in the black hat.

They shoved the box in, lunging after it. It squealed softly, sliding in without effort as if on ways or wheels. The man who had opened the doors, shot a large silvered pin into a hole behind the box, then in one skilful motion shut the doors. At a nod from the man in the black hat, the carriage rolled on a little distance, then stopped. Another carriage drew up before the house.

Supported by a man on either side of her, a woman in black, all bowed and veiled, came sobbing out of the house. The crowd murmured, a woman whimpered. David had never seen a handkerchief with a black border. Hers seemed white as snow.

Voices of children. He looked around.

Annie and Yussie were there, staring at the woman as she entered the carriage. He shuddered, contracting, crept behind the crowd and broke into a run.

At the doorway of his house he stopped, peered in, stepped back. What was he going to do now? At lunch time, as he neared the house, he had seen Mrs. Nerrick, the landlady, climb up the stoop. By running frantically, he had caught up to her, had raced past the cellar, before she shut her door. But now there was no one in sight. At any moment Annie and Yussie might come round the corner. He must — before they saw — but the darkness, the door, the darkness. The man in the box in the carriage. Alone. He must.

Make a noise. Noise … He advanced. What? Noise. Any.

“Aaaaah! Ooooh!” he quavered, “My country ’tis of dee!” He began running. The cellar door. Louder. “Sweet land of liberty,” he shrilled, and whirled toward the stairs. “Of dee I sing.” His voice rose in a shriek. His feet pounded on the stair. At his back, the monstrous horde of fear. “Land where our fodders died!” The landing; he dove for the door, flinging himself upon it — Threw it open, slammed it shut, and stood there panting in terror.

His mother was standing, staring at him in wide-eyed amazement. “Was that you?”

Close to tears, he lowered his head.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he whimpered.

She laughed hopelessly and sat down. “Come here, you strange child. Come here. You’re white!”

David went over and sank against her breast.

“You’re trembling,” she stroked his hair.

“I’m afraid,” he murmured against her throat.

“Still afraid?” she said soothingly. “Still the dream pursuing you?”

“Yes,” a dry sob shook him. “And something else.”

“What else?” She pressed him toward her with an encircling arm. In the other hand, she took both of his. “What?” she murmured. Her lips’ soft pressure against his temples seemed to sink inward, downward, radiating a calm and a sweetness that only his body could grasp. “What else?”

“I saw a — a man who was in a box. You told me once.”

“What? Oh!” her puzzled face cleared. “A funeral. God grant us life. Where was it?”

“Around the corner.”

“And that frightened you?”

“Yes. And the hall was dark.”

“I understand.”

“Will you wait in the hall if I call you next time?”

“Yes. I’ll wait as often as you like.”

David heaved a quivering sigh of relief and kissed her cheek in gratitude.

“If I didn’t,” she laughed, “Mrs. Nerrick, the landlady, would dispossess us. I never heard such a thunder of feet!” When she had unbuttoned his leggings she rose and set him in a chair. “Sit there, darling. It’s Friday, I have so much to do.”

For a while, David sat still and watched her, feeling his heart grow quiet again, then turned and looked out of the window. A fine rain had begun to fall, serrying the windows with aimless ranks. In the yard the snow under the rain was beginning to turn from white to grey. Blue smoke beat down, strove upward, was gone. Now and then, the old house creaked when the wind elbowed in and out the alley. Borne through mist and rain from some remote river, a boat horn boomed, set up strange reverberations in the heart …

Friday. Rain. The end of school. He could stay home now, stay home and do nothing, stay near his mother the whole afternoon. He turned from the window and regarded her. She was seated before the table paring beets. The first cut into a beet was like lifting a lid from a tiny stove. Sudden purple under the peel; her hands were stained with it. Above her blue and white checkered apron her face bent down, intent upon her work, her lips pressed gravely together. He loved her. He was happy again.

His eyes roamed about the kitchen: the confusion of Friday afternoons. Pots on the stove, parings in the sink, flour smeared on the rolling pin, the board. The air was warm, twined with many odors. His mother rose, washed the beets, drained them, set them aside.

“There!” she said. “I can begin cleaning again.”

She cleared the table, washed what dishes were soiled, emptied out the peelings that cluttered the sink into the garbage can. Then she got down on all fours and began to mop the floor. With knees drawn up, David watched her wipe the linoleum beneath his chair. The shadow between her breasts, how deep! How far it — No! No! Luter! When he looked! That night! Mustn’t! Mustn’t! Look away! Quick! Look at — look at the linoleum there, how it glistened under a thin film of water.

“Now you’ll have to sit there till it dries,” she cautioned him, straightening up and brushing back the few wisps of hair that had fallen over her cheek. “It will only be a few minutes.” She stooped, walked backward to the steps, trailing the mop over her footprints, then went into the frontroom.

Left alone, he became despondent again. His thoughts returned to Luter. He would come again this evening. Why? Why didn’t he go away. Would they have to run away every Thursday? Go to Yussie’s house? Would he have to play with Annie again? He didn’t want to. He never wanted to see her again. And he would have to. The way he did this afternoon beside the carriages. The black carriage with the window. Scared. The long box. Scared. The cellar. No! No!

“Mama!” he called out.

“What is it, my son?”

“Are you going to — to sleep inside?”

“Oh, no. Of course not! I’m just straightening my hair a little.”

“Are you coming in here soon?”

“Why yes. Is there anything you want?”

“Yes.”

“In just a moment.”

He waited impatiently for her to appear. In a little while she came out. She had changed her dress and combed her hair. She spread a frayed clean towel out on the parlor steps and sat down.

“I can’t come over unless I have to,” she smiled. “You’re on an island. What is it you want?”

“I forgot,” he said lamely.

“Oh, you’re a goose!”

“It has to dry,” he explained. “And I have to watch it.”

“And so I do too, is that it? My, what a tyrant you’ll make when you’re married!”

David really didn’t care what she thought of him just as long as she sat there. Besides, he did have something to ask her, only he couldn’t make up his mind to venture it. It might be too unpleasant. Still no matter what her answer would be, no matter what he found out, he was always safe near her.

“Mama, did you ever see anyone dead?”

“You’re very cheerful to-day!”

“Then tell me.” Now that he had launched himself on this perilous sea, he was resolved to cross it. “Tell me,” he insisted.

“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “The twins who died when I was a little girl I don’t remember. My grandmother though, she was the first I really saw and remember. I was sixteen then.”

“Why did she die?”

“I don’t know. No one seemed to know.”

“Then why did she die?”

“What a dogged questioner you are! I’m sure she had a reason. But do you want to know what I think?”

“Yes!” eagerly.

His mother took a deep breath, lifted a finger to arouse an already fervent attention. “She was very small, my grandmother, very frail and delicate. The light came through her hands like the light through a fan. What has that to do with it? Nothing. But while my grandfather was very pious, she only pretended to be — just as I pretend, may God forgive us both. Now long ago, she had a little garden before her house. It was full of sweet flowers in the summertime, and she tended it all by herself. My grandfather, stately Jew, could never understand why she should spend a whole spring morning watering the flowers and plucking off the dead leaves, and snipping here and patting there, when she had so many servants to do it for her. You would hardly believe how cheap servants were in those days — my grandfather had five of them. Yes, he would fret when he saw her working in the garden and say it was almost irreligious for a Jewess of her rank — she was rich then remember — the forests hadn’t been cut”—

“What forests?”

“I’ve told you about them — the great forests and the lumber camps. We were rich while the forests were there. But after they were cut and the lumber camps moved away, we grew poor. Do you understand? And so my grandfather would fret when he saw her go dirtying her hands in the soil like any peasant’s wife. But my grandmother would only smile at him — I can still see her bent over and smiling up at him — and say that since she had no beautiful beard like his to stroke, what harm could there be in getting a little dirt on her hands. My grandfather had a beard that turned white early; he was very proud of it. And once she told him that she was sure the good Lord would not be angry at her if she did steal a little from Esau’s heritage — the earth and the fields are Esau’s heritage — since Esau himself, she said, was stealing from Isaac on every side — she meant all the new stores that were being opened by the other gentiles in our town. What could my grandfather do? He would laugh and call her a serpent. Now wait! Wait! I’m coming to it.” She smiled at his impatience.

“As she grew older, she grew very strange. Shall I tell you what she used do? When autumn came and everything had died—”

“Died? Everything?” David interrupted her.

“Not everything, little goose. The flowers. When they died she didn’t want to leave the house. Wasn’t that strange? She stayed for days and days in her large living room — it had crystal chandeliers. You wouldn’t believe how quietly she would sit — not seeing the servants, hardly hearing what was said — and her hands folded in her lap — So. Nor could my grandfather, though he begged her to come out, ever make her. He even went to ask a great Rabbi about it — it was no use. Not till the first snow fall, did she willingly leave the house again.”

“Why?”

“Here is the answer. See if you can find it. When I came to visit her once on a day in late autumn, I found her sitting very quietly, as usual, in her large arm-chair. But when I was about to take my coat off, she said, keep it on, Genya, darling, there is mine on the chair in the corner. Will you get it for me, child?

“Well, I stood still staring at her in surprise. Her coat? I thought. Was she really of her own accord going out and in Autumn? And then for the first time I noticed that she was dressed in her prettiest Sabbath clothes — a dark, shimmering satin — very costly. I can see her yet. And on her head — she had never let them cut her hair — she had set a broad round comb with rows of pearls in it — the first present my grandfather had ever given her. It was like a pale crown. And so I fetched her coat and helped her put it on. Where are you going, grandmother? I asked. I was puzzled. In the garden, she said, in the garden. Well, an old woman must have her way, and into the garden we went. The day was very grey and full of winds, whirling, strong winds that could hold the trees down like a hand. Even us it almost blew about and it was cold. And I said to her, Grandmother, isn’t it too cold out here? Isn’t the wind too strong? No, her coat was warm, so she said. And then she said a very strange thing. Do you remember Petrush Kolonov? I wasn’t sure. A goy, she said, a clod. He worked for your grandfather many years. He had a neck like a tree once, but he grew old and crooked at last. And when he grew so old he couldn’t lift a faggot, he would sit on a stone and look at the mountains. This was my grandmother talking, you understand?”

David couldn’t quite follow these threads within threads, but nodded. “Why did he sit?” he asked, afraid that she might stop talking.

She laughed lightly. “That same question has been asked by three generations. You. Myself. My grandmother. He had been a good drudge this Petrush, a good ox. And when my grandmother asked him, Petrush, why do you sit like a keg and stare at the mountains, his only answer was, my teeth are all gone. And that’s the story my grandmother told me while we walked. You look puzzled,” she laughed again.

He was indeed, but she didn’t explain.

“And so we walked and the leaves were blowing. Shew-w-w! How they lifted, and one blew against her coat, and while the wind held it there, you know, like a finger, she lifted it off and crumbled it. And then she said suddenly, come let us turn back. And just as we were about to go in she sighed so that she shivered — deep — the way one sighs just before sleep — and she dropped the bits of leaves she was holding and she said, it is wrong being the way I am. Even a leaf grows dull and old together! Together! You understand? Oh, she was wise! And we went inside.”

His mother stopped, touched the floor to see if it was dry. Then she rose and went to the stove to push the seething beet soup from where it had been over the heat of the coals to the cooler end of the stove.

“And now the floor is dry,” she smiled, “I’m liberated.”

But David felt cheated, even resentful. “You — you haven’t told me anything!” he protested. “You haven’t even told me what happened?”

“Haven’t I?” She laughed. “There’s hardly anything more to tell. She died the winter of that same year, before the snow fell.” She stared at the rain beating against the window. Her face sobered. The last wink of her eyelids before she spoke was the slowest. “She looked so frail in death, in her shroud — how shall I tell you, my son? Like early winter snow. And I thought to myself even then, let me look deeply into her face for surely she will melt before my eyes.” She smiled again. “Have I told you enough now?”

He nodded. Without knowing why, her last words stirred him. What he had failed to grasp as thought, her last gesture, the last supple huskiness of her voice conveyed. Was it in his heart this dreamlike fugitive sadness dwelled, or did it steep the feathery air of the kitchen? He could not tell. But if only the air were always this way, and he always here alone with his mother. He was near her now. He was part of her. The rain outside the window set continual seals upon their isolation, upon their intimacy, their identity. When she lifted the stove lid, the rosy glow that stained her wide brow warmed his own body as well. He was near her. He was part of her. Oh, it was good being here. He watched her every movement hungrily.

She threw a new white table cloth over the table. It hovered like a cloud in air and settled slowly. Then she took down from the shelf three brass candlesticks and placed them in the center of whiteness, then planted candles into each brass cup.

“Mama.”

“Yes?”

“What do they do when they die?”

“What?” she repeated. “They are cold; they are still. They shut their eyes in sleep eternal years.”

Eternal years. The words echoed in his mind. Raptly, he turned them over and over as though they had a lustre and shape of their own. Eternal years.

His mother set the table. Knives ringing faintly, forks, spoons, side by side. The salt shaker, secret little vessel of dull silver, the pepper, greyish-brown eye in the shallow glass, the enameled sugar bowl, headless shoulders of silver tongs leaning above the rim.

“Mama, what are eternal years?”

His mother sighed somewhat desperately, lifted her eyes a moment then dropped them to the table, her gaze wandered thoughtfully over the dishes and silverware. Then her eyes brightened. Reaching toward the sugar bowl she lifted out the tongs, carefully pinched a cube of sugar, and held it up before his eyes.

“This is how wide my brain can stretch,” she said banteringly. “You see? No wider. Would you ask me to pick up a frozen sea with these narrow things? Not even the ice-man could do it.” She dropped the tongs back into the bowl. “The sea to this—”

“But—” David interrupted, horrified and bewildered. “But when do they wake up, mama?”

She opened her two palms in a gesture of emptiness. “There is nothing left to waken.”

“But sometime, mama,” he urged.

She shook her head.

“But sometime.”

“Not here, if anywhere. They say there is a heaven and in heaven they waken. But I myself do not believe it. May God forgive me for telling you this. But it’s all I know. I know only that they are buried in the dark earth and their names last a few more lifetimes on their gravestones.”

The dark. In the dark earth. Eternal years. It was a terrible revelation. He stared at her fixedly. Picking up a cloth that lay on the washtub, she went to the oven, flipped the door open, drew out a pan. The warmth and odor of new bread entered his being as through a rigid haze of vision. She spread out a napkin near the candlesticks, lifted the bread out of the pan and placed it on the square of linen.

“I still have the candles to light,” she murmured sitting down, “and my work is done. I don’t know why they made Friday so difficult a day for women.”

— Dark. In the grave. Eternal years …

Rain in brief gusts seething at the window … The clock ticked too briskly. No, never. It wasn’t sometime … In the dark.

Slowly the last belated light raveled into dusk. Across the short space of the kitchen, his mother’s face trembled as if under sea, grew blurred. Flecks, intricate as foam, swirled in the churning dark—

— Like popcorn blowing in that big window in that big candystore. Blowing and settling. That day. Long ago.

His gaze followed the aimless flux of light that whirled and flickered in the room, troubling the outline of door and table.

— Snow it was, grey snow. Tiny bits of paper, floating from the window, that day. Confetti, a boy said. Confetti, he said. They threw it down on those two who were going to be married. The man in the tall, black shiny hat, hurrying. The lady in white laughing, leaning against him, dodging the confetti, winking it out of her eyes. Carriages waiting. Confetti on the step, on the horses. Funny. Then they got inside, both laughing. Confetti. Carriages.

— Carriages!

— The same!

— This afternoon! When the box came out! Carriages.

— Same!

— Carriages—!

“Dear God!” exclaimed his mother. “You startled me! What makes you leap that way in your chair? This is the second time today!”

“They were the same,” he said in a voice of awe. It was solved now. He saw it clearly. Everything belonged to the same dark. Confetti and coffins.

“What were the same?”

“The carriages!”

“Oh, child!” she cried with amused desperation. “God alone knows what you’re dreaming about now!” She rose from her chair, went over to the wall where the matchbox hung, “I had better light these candles before you see an angel.”

The match rasped on the sandpaper, flared up, making David aware of how dark it had become.

One by one she lit the candles. The flame crept tipsily up the wick, steadied, mellowed the steadfast brass below, glowed on each knot of the crisp golden braid of the bread on the napkin. Twilight vanished, the kitchen gleamed. Day that had begun in labor and disquiet, blossomed now in candlelight and sabbath.

With a little, deprecating laugh, his mother stood before the candles, and bowing her head before them, murmured through the hands she spread before her face the ancient prayer for the Sabbath …

The hushed hour, the hour of tawny beatitude …

X

HIS mother rose, lit the gas lamp. Sudden, blue light condensed the candle flames to irrelevant kernels of yellow. He eyed them sadly, wishing that she hadn’t lit the lamp.

“They will be coming soon,” she said.

They! He started in dismay. They were coming! Luter. His father. They! Oh! The lull of peace was over. He could feel dread rising within him like a cloud — as though his mother’s words had been a stone flung on dusty ground. The hush and the joy were leaving him! Why did Luter have to come? David would be ashamed to look at him, could not look at him. Even thinking of Luter made him feel as he felt that day in school when the boy in the next seat picked his nose and rolled the snot between his fingers, then peered round with a vacant grin and wiped it off under the seat. It made his toes curl in disgust. He shouldn’t have seen him, shouldn’t have known.

“Is Mr. Luter going to come here too?”

“Of course.” She turned to look at him. “Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know. I just thought — I–I thought maybe he didn’t like the way you cooked.”

“The way I—? Oh! I see!” She reddened faintly. “I didn’t know you could remember so well.” She looked about as though she had forgotten something and then went up the stairs into the frontroom.

He stared out of the window into the dark. Rain still beat down. They must be hurrying toward him now in the rain, hurrying because it was raining. If only he could get away before they came, hide till Luter was gone, never come back till Luter had gone away forever. How could he go? He caught his breath. If he ran away now before his mother came back — stole out through the door silently. Like that! Opened the door, crept down the stairs. The cellar! Run by and run away, leaving upstairs an empty kitchen. She would look about, under the table, in the hall; she would call — David! David! Where are you? David! He’d be gone—

In the frontroom, the sound of a window opening, shutting again. His mother came in, bearing a grey covered pot between her hands. Rain drops on its sides, water in the hollow of the lid.

“A fearful night.” She emptied the overflowing lid into the sink. “The fish is frozen.”

Too late now.

He must stay here now, till the end, till Luter had come and gone. But perhaps his mother was wrong and perhaps Luter wouldn’t come, if only he never came again. Why should he come here again? He was here yesterday and there was nobody home. Don’t come here, his mind whispered to itself again and again. Please, Mr. Luter, don’t come here! Don’t come here any more.

The minutes passed, and just at that moment when it seemed to David that he had forgotten about Luter, the familiar tread of feet scraped through the hallway below. Voices on the stair! Luter had come. With one look at his mother’s pursed, attentive face, he sidled toward the frontroom, sneaked up the stairs and into the dark. He stood at the window, listening to the sounds behind him. The door was opened. He heard their greetings, Luter’s voice and slow speech. They must be taking their coats off now. If only they would forget about him. If only it were possible. But—

“Where’s the prayer?” he heard his father ask.

A pause and his mother’s voice. “He’s in the frontroom I think. David!”

“Yes, mama.” A wave of anger and frustration shook him.

“He’s there.”

Satisfied that he was there, they seemed to forget him for a little while, but again his father and this time with the dangerous accent of annoyance.

“Well, why doesn’t he come in? David!”

There could be no more delay. He must go in. Eyes fixed before his feet, he came out of the frontroom, shuffled to his seat and sat down, conscious all the time that the others were gazing at him curiously.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked his father sharply.

“I don’t quite know. Perhaps his stomach. He has eaten very little today.”

“Well, he’ll eat now,” said his father warningly. “You feed him too many trifles.”

“A doubtful stomach is a sad thing,” said Luter condoningly, and David hated him for his sympathy.

“Ach,” exclaimed his father, “it isn’t his stomach, Joe, it’s his palate — jaded with delicacies.”

His mother set the soup before him. “This will taste good,” she coaxed.

He dared not refuse, though the very thought of eating sickened him. Steeling himself against the first mouthful, he dipped the spoon into the shimmering red liquid, lifted it to his lips. Instead of reaching his mouth, the spoon reached only his chin, struck against the hollow under his lower lip, scalded it, fell from his nerveless fingers into the plate. A red fountain splashed out in all directions, staining his blouse, staining the white table cloth. With a feeling of terror David watched the crimson splotches on the cloth widen till they met each other.

His father lowered his spoon angrily into his plate. “Lame as a Turk!” he snapped, rapping the table with his knuckles. “Will you lift your head, or do you want that in the plate too?”

He raised frightened eyes. Luter glanced at him sidewise, sucking his teeth in wary disapproval.

“It’s nothing!” exclaimed his mother comfortingly. “That’s what table cloths were made for.”

“To splash soup on, eh?” retorted her husband sarcastically. “And that’s what shirts were made for too! Very fine. Why not the whole plate while he’s at it.”

Luter chuckled.

Without answering, his mother reached over and stroked his brow with her palm. “Go on and eat, child.”

“What are you doing now,” demanded his father, “sounding his brow for fever? Child! There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the brat, except your pampering him!” He shook his finger at David ominously. “Now you swill your soup like a man, or I’ll ladle you out something else instead.”

David whimpered, eyed his plate in cowed rebellion.

“Take heed!”

“Perhaps he had better not eat,” interposed his mother.

“Don’t interfere.” And to David, “Are you going to eat?”

Trembling, and almost on the verge of nausea, David picked up the spoon and forcing himself, ate. The sickening spasm passed.

Impatiently, his father turned to Luter. “What were you saying, Joe?”

“I was saying,” said Luter in his slow voice, “that you would have to lock up the place after you left — only one door, you see. The rest I will close before I go.” He reached into his coat pocket and drawing out a ring of keys, detached one. “This one closes it. And I’ll tell you,” he handed the key to David’s father. “I’m putting it down as four hours. The whole job won’t take you more than two — three at most.”

“I see.”

“You won’t get the extra this week though. The bookkeeper—”

“Next week then.”

Luter cleared his throat. “You’re having one diner less tomorrow evening,” he said to David’s mother.

“Yes?” she asked in constrained surprise, and turning to David’s father, “Will you be so late, Albert?”

“Not I.”

“No, not Albert,” chuckled Luter, “I.”

David’s heart leaped in secret joy.

“Then I shan’t prepare dinner for you tomorrow night?”

“No, I have something to do tomorrow night,” he said vaguely. “Sunday perhaps. No, I’ll tell you. If I’m not here by seven o’clock Sunday, don’t keep the dinner waiting for me.”

“Very well.”

“I’ll pay for the week in full anyhow.”

“If you’re not coming—” she objected.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” said Luter, “that’s settled.” He nodded and picked up his spoon.

During the rest of the meal, David ate cautiously peering up furtively from time to time to see whether anything he did was displeasing his father. At Luter, he never ventured a glance for fear the very sight of the man would confuse him into further blunders. By the time his mother set the dessert before him, he was already casting about for some way to retreat, some place where he could hide and yet be thought present, or at least, be accounted for. He might feign drowsiness and his mother would put him to bed, but he could not do that now. It was too early. What would he do till then? Where could he escape for a little while? The rooms of the house passed before his mind. The frontroom? His father would say, “What is he doing in there in the dark?” The bedroom? No. His father would say the same thing. Where? The bathroom. Yes! He would sit on the toilet seat. Stay there till he heard some one call, then come out.

He had eaten the last prune, and was just about to slip from his chair when out of the corner of his eye, he saw Luter’s hand move toward his vest-pocket and draw out his watch.

“I must go!” He smacked his lips.

He was going! David could have danced for joy. It was too good to be true!

“So soon?” asked his mother.

To David’s surprise, his father laughed, and a moment later Luter joined him as if they shared some secret joke.

“I’m somewhat late as it is.” Luter pushed his chair back and rose. “But first I must pay you.”

David stared at his plate, listening. He could think of only one thing — Luter was going, would be gone in another minute. He glanced up. His father had just gone into the bedroom and in the moment of his absence Luter darted quick eyes at his mother. David shivered with revulsion and hastily looked down. Taking the coat which David’s father had just brought out, Luter got into it, and David with all the forces of his mind, tried to hasten the feet that were moving toward the door.

“Well,” Luter finally said, “a good week to you all. May the prayer,” his hat pointed at David, “recover soon.”

“Thank you,” said his mother. “Good week.”

“Lift your head,” snapped his father. David hastily looked up. “Goodnight, Joe, I’ll see you to-morrow. Good luck.” Both men laughed.

“Good night.” Luter went out.

With a quiet sigh of relief David uncurled from the tense, inner crouch his body seemed to have assumed, and looking about saw his father gazing at the door. His face had relaxed into a bare smile.

“He’s looking for trouble,” he said dryly.

“What do you mean?”

His father uttered an amused snort. “Didn’t you notice how peculiarly he behaved tonight?”

“I did—” she hesitated, watching his face inquiringly—“at least — Why?”

He turned to her; her eyes swerved back to the dishes.

“Didn’t you notice how embarrassed he was?”

“No. Well. Perhaps.”

“Then you don’t notice very much,” he chuckled shortly. “He’s off to a marriage-broker.”

“Oh!” Her brow cleared.

“Yes. It’s a secret. You understand? You know nothing about it.”

“I understand,” she smiled faintly.

“He’s free as air, and he’s looking for a stone around his neck.”

“Perhaps he does need a wife,” she reminded him. “I mean I have often heard him say he wanted a home and children.”

“Ach, children! Fresh grief! It isn’t children he’s looking for, it’s a little money. He wants to open a shop of his own. At least that’s what he says.”

“I thought you said he was looking for troubles?” she laughed.

“Certainly! He’s hurrying things too much. If he waited a few more years he’d have enough money of his own to set up a shop — without a wife. Wait! I said to him. Wait! No, he said. I need a thousand. I want a big place four or five presses. But he’ll find out what a Yiddish thousand is. If it melts no further than five hundred the morning after he ducked under the canopy, let none call him unfortunate.” He belched quietly, the adam’s apple on his neck jogging, and then looked around with knit brows as though seeking something.

“I heard him ask you to close up the shop,” she inquired.

“Yes, he’s giving me a little overtime. I won’t be home till four or five — perhaps later. Bah!” he burst out impatiently, “The man makes eighteen dollars a week — six more than I do — and he itches to pawn himself to a wife.” He paused, looked about again—“Where’s The Tageblatt?”

His wife looked up startled. “The Tageblatt”, she repeated in dismay, “Oh, where are my wits, I’ve forgotten to buy it. The rain! I put it off.”

He scowled.

Noisily setting the dishes down in the sink, she wiped her hands on a towel. “I’ll be only a minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“My shawl.”

“What’s the matter with him, hasn’t he feet?”

“But I can do it so much more quickly.”

“That’s the whole trouble with you,” he said curtly. “You do everything for him. Let him go down.”

“But it’s wet out, Albert.”

His face darkened, “Let him go down,” he repeated. “Is it any wonder he won’t eat. He moulders in the house all day! Get your coat on.” His head jerked sharply. “Shudder when I speak to you.”

David sprang from his seat, gazed apprehensively at his mother.

“Oh,” she protested, “why do you—”

“Be still! Well?”

“Very well,” she said, annoyed yet resigned, “I’ll get him his coat.”

She brought his coat out of the bedroom and helped him into it, his father meanwhile standing above them and muttering, as he always did, that he was big enough to fetch and get into his clothes by himself. Uneasily he tried to take his rubbers from her, but she insisted on helping him.

“It’s two cents,” she gave him a dime. “Here is ten. Ask for The Tageblatt and wait till they give you change.”

“Eight cents change,” his father admonished. “And don’t forget The Tageblatt.”

As David went out, his mother trailed behind him into the hall.

“Are you going down with him too?” his father inquired.

But without making a reply, she leaned over David and whispered. “Hurry down! I’ll wait!” And aloud as if giving him the last instruction. “The candy store on the corner.”

David went down as quickly as he could. The cellar door was brown in the gaslight. The raw night air met him at the end of the doorway. He went out. Rain, seen only where it blurred the distant lamps, still fell, seeking his face and the nape of his neck with icy fingers. The candy store window glimmered near the corner. His breath an evanescent plume, he hurried toward it, splashing in hidden puddles, his toes curling down against the rising chill. The streets were frightening, seen in loneliness this way, rain-swept, dark and deserted.

He didn’t like his father. He never would like him. He hated him.

The candy store at last. He opened the door, hearing overhead the familiar tinny jangle of the bell. Gnawing a frayed chicken bone the half-grown son of the storekeeper came out of the back.

“Waddayuh want?”

“De Tageblatt.”

The boy lifted a newspaper out of a small pile on the counter, handed it to David, who having taken it, turned to go.

“Where’s your money?” demanded the boy impatiently.

“Oh, hea.” David reached up and handed over the dime that he had been clutching in his hand all this time.

Clamping the bone between his teeth the boy made change and returned it, greasy fingers greasing the coins.

He went out, hurried toward the house. Walking was too slow; his mother would be waiting. He began to run. He had only taken a few strides forward when his foot suddenly landed on something that was not pavement. The sound of hollow iron warned him too late — A coal-chute cover. He slipped. With a gasp, he teetered in air, striving, clawing for a moment at a void, and then pitched forward, sprawling in the icy slush. Money and newspaper flew from his hands and now lay scattered in the dark. Frightened, knees and stockings soaked, he pushed himself to his feet, and began wildly looking about for what he had dropped.

He found the newspaper — sopping. Then a penny. More, there was more. He peered frantically in the dark. Another penny. Two cents now. But he had eight before. He plunged his hand here, there into the numbing snow, felt along the rough pavement, retraced, groped. Further ahead! Back! Nothing. Beside the curb maybe! Nothing. He would never find it. Never! He burst into tears, ran toward the house, careless now whether he fell or not. It would be better for him if he fell now, if he were hurt. Sobbing, he entered the hallway. He heard a door open upstairs, and his mother’s voice at the top of the stairs.

“Child, I’m here.”

He climbed up.

“What is it? What is it? Why, you’re soaked through!” She led him in.

“I lost the money.” He wailed. “I only have two — two cents.”

His father was staring at him angrily, “You’ve lost it, have you? I had a feeling you would. Paid yourself for your errand, have you?”

“I fell in the snow,” he sobbed.

“It’s all right,” said his mother gently, taking the newspaper and the money away from him. “It’s all right.”

“All right? Will everything he does be all right always? How long will you tell him that?” His father snatched the paper from her. “Why, it’s wringing wet. A handy young man, my son!”

His mother took his coat off. “Come sit near the stove.”

“Indulge him! Indulge him!” her husband muttered wrathfully and flung himself into a chair. “Look at that paper!” He slapped it open on the table. “My way would be a few sound cuffs.”

“He couldn’t help it,” she interposed placatingly. “It’s very slippery and he fell.”

“Bah! He couldn’t help it! That’s all I ever hear from you! He has a downright gift for stumbling into every black moment of the year. At night he breaks one’s sleep with a squalling about dreams. A little while ago he flings his spoon into his soup. Now — six cents thrown away.” He slapped his hand on the paper. “Two cents ruined. Who can read it! Beware!” he shook a menacing finger at David who cowered against his mother’s side. “There’s a good beating in store for you! I warn you! It’s been gathering for years.”

“Albert,” said his wife reddening, “you are a man without a heart.”

“I?” His father drew back, his nostrils curving out in anger. “A plague on you both — I have no heart? And have you any understanding, any knowledge of how to bring up a child?” He thrust his jaw forward.

A moment of silence followed and then “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean it. I meant only — these things happen sometimes — I’m sorry!”

“Oh, you’re sorry,” he said bitterly. “I have no heart! Woe me, to labor as I labor, for food for the two of you and for a roof over your heads. To labor and to work overtime! In vain! I have no heart! As if I gorged myself upon my earnings, as if I drank them, wallowed in the streets. Have you ever gone without anything? Tell me!”

“No! No!”

“Well?”

“I meant only that you didn’t see the child all day as I did — naturally you don’t know when anything is wrong with him.”

“I see enough of him when I see him. And I know better than you what medicine he needs most.”

His mother was silent.

“You’ll be saying he needs a doctor next.”

“Perhaps he—”

But someone was knocking at the door. She stopped speaking, went over and opened it — Yussie came in; he held a wooden clothes-hanger in his hand.

“My mother wants you to go upstairs,” he said in Yiddish.

David’s mother shook her head impatiently.

“Have you taken to gadding about?” asked her husband disgustedly. “Only a few days ago, you had no neighbors at all.”

“I’ve only been there once,” she said apologetically. And to Yussie, “Tell your mother I can’t come up just now.”

“She’s waiting for you,” he answered without stirring. “She’s got a new dress to show you.”

“Not now.”

“I ain’ goin’ op,” Yussie switched into English as if to avoid any further discussion. “I’m gonna stay hea.” And apparently satisfied that his mission had been performed, he approached the uneasy David who was still seated beside the stove. “See wot I got — a bow ’n’ arrer.” He brandished the clothes hanger.

“I’ll have to go for just a minute,” she said hesitantly. “This child — she’ll be wondering—”

“Go! Go!” said her husband sullenly. “Am I stopping you?” He picked up the newspaper, plucked a match from the match-box and then stalked up into the frontroom and slammed the door behind him. David heard him fling himself down upon the couch.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said his mother wearily, and casting a hopeless glance after her husband, went out.

“Aintcha gonna play?” asked Yussie after a pause.

“I don’ wanna,” he answered morosely.

“W’yncha wanna?”

“Cause I don’ wanna.” He eyed the clothes hanger with disgust. It had been upstairs in a closet; it was tainted.

“Aaa, c’mon!” And when David refused to be persuaded, “Den I’m gonna shootchuh!” he threatened. “Yuh wanna see me?” He lifted the clothes hanger, pulled back an imaginary string. “Bing! I’m an Innian. If you don’ have a bow ’n’ arrer, I c’n kill yuh. Bang!” Another shaft flew. “Right innee eye. W’yntcha wanna play?”

“I don’ wanna.”

“W’yntcha get a bow ’n’ arrer?”

“Lemme alone!”

“I’m gonna shootchuh again den,” he dropped to the floor. “Bing! Dot one went right inside. Yuh dead!”

“Go ’way!”

“I don’ wanna go ’way,” he had become cross. “I’m gonna shootcha all I wan’. Yuh a cowid.”

David was silent. He was beginning to tremble.

“I c’n even hitcha wit my hatchet,” continued Yussie. “Yuh a cowid.” He crawled up defiantly. “Wanna see me hitcha wit my hatchet?” He had grasped the clothes hanger at one end, “Yuh dare me?”

“Get otta here!” hissed David frantically. “Go in yuh own house!”

“I don’ wanna,” said Yussie truculently. “I c’n fight-choo. Wanna see me?” He drew back his arm, “Bing!” The point of the clothes hanger struck David in the knee, sending a flash of pain through his whole leg. He cried out. The next moment, he had kicked at Yussie’s face with all the force in his leg.

Yussie fell forward on his hands. He opened his mouth, but uttered no sound. Instead his eyes bulged as if he were strangling, and to David’s horror the blood began to trickle from under his pinched white nostrils. For moments that seemed years of agony the blood slowly branched above his lip. He stood that way tranced and rigid. Suddenly he sucked in his breath, the sound was flat, sudden, like the sound of a stone falling into water. With terrified care, he reached up his hand to touch the scarlet bead hanging from his lips, and when he beheld the red smear on his finger tips, his face knitted with fright, and he threw back his head, and uttered the most piercing scream that David had ever heard. So piercing was it that David could feel his own throat contract as though the scream were splitting from his own body and he were trying to stifle it. With the awful realization that his father was in the next room, he sprang to his feet.

“Here, Yussie,” he cried frenziedly, trying to force the clothes hanger into his hands. “Here, hit me Yussie. G’wan hit me Yussie!” And striking himself a sharp blow on the brow, “Look, Yussie, you hoited me. Ow!”

But to no avail. Once more Yussie screamed. And now David knew he was lost.

“Mama!” he moaned in terror. “Mama!” And turned toward the frontroom door as if toward doom.

It opened. His father glared at them in angry surprise. Then his features grew taut when his eyes fixed on Yussie. His nostrils broadened and grew pale.

“What have you done?” His voice was deliberate and incredulous.

“I–I—” David stammered, shrunken with fear.

“He kicked me right in duh nose!” Yussie howled.

Never taking his blazing eyes from David, his father came down the parlor stairs. “What?” he ground, towering above him. “Speak!” Slowly his arm swung toward the sobbing Yussie; it was like a dial measuring his gathering wrath. “Tell me did you do this?” With every word he uttered his lips became thinner and more rigid. His face to David seemed slowly to recede, but recede without diminishing, growing more livid with distance, a white flame bodiless. In the molten features, only the vein upon his brow was clear, pulsing like a dark levin.

Who could bear the white heat of those features? Terror numbed his throat. He gagged. His head waited for his eyes to lower, his eyes for his head. He quivered, and in quivering wrenched free of that awful gaze.

“Answer me!”

Answer me, his words rang out. Answer me, but they meant, Despair! Who could answer his father? In that dread summons the judgement was already sealed. Like a cornered thing, he shrank within himself, deadened his mind because the body would not deaden and waited. Nothing existed any longer except his father’s right hand — the hand that hung down into the electric circle of his vision. Terrific clarity was given him. Terrific leisure. Transfixed, timeless, he studied the curling fingers that twitched spasmodically, studied the printer’s ink ingrained upon the finger tips, pondered, as if all there were in the world, the nail of the smallest finger, nipped by a press, that climbed in a jagged little stair to the hangnail. Terrific absorption.

The hammer in that hand when he stood! The hammer!

Suddenly he cringed. His eyelids blotted out the light like a shutter. The open hand struck him full against the cheek and temple, splintering the brain into fragments of light. Spheres, mercuric, splattered, condensed and roared. He fell to the floor. The next moment his father had snatched up the clothes hanger, and in that awful pause before it descended upon his shoulders, he saw with that accelerated vision of agony, how mute and open mouthed Yussie stood now, with what useless silence.

“You won’t answer!” The voice that snarled was the voice of the clothes hanger biting like flame into his flesh. “A curse on your vicious heart! Wild beast! Here, then! Here! Here! Now I’ll tame you! I’ve a free hand now! I warned you! I warned you! Would you heed!”

The chopping strokes of the clothes hanger flayed his wrists, his hands, his back, his breast. There was always a place for it to land no matter where he ducked or writhed or groveled. He screamed, screamed, and still the blows fell.

“Please papa! Please! No more! No more! Darling papa! Darling papa!” He knew that in another moment he would thrust his head beneath that rain of blows. Anguish! Anguish! He must escape!

“Now bawl!” the voice raged. “Now scream! But I pleaded with you! Pleaded as I would with death! You were stubborn were you! Silent were you! Secret—”

The door was thrown open. With a wild cry, his mother rushed in, flung herself between them.

“Mama!” he screamed, clutching at her dress. “Mama!”

“Oh, God!” she cried in terror and swooped him into her arms. “Stop! Stop! Albert! What have you done to him!”

“Let him go!” he snarled. “Let him go I tell you!”

“Mama!” David clung to her frenziedly. “Don’t let him! Don’t let him!”

“With that!” she screamed hoarsely, trying to snatch the clothes hanger from him. “With that to strike a child. Woe to you! Heart of stone! how could you!”

“I haven’t struck him before!” The voice was strangled. “What I did he deserved! You’ve been protecting him from me long enough! It’s been coming to him for a long time!”

“Your only son!” she wailed, pressing David convulsively to her. “Your only son!”

“Don’t tell me that! I don’t want to hear it! He’s no son of mine! Would he were dead at my feet!”

“Oh, David, David beloved!” In her anguish over her child, she seemed to forget everyone else, even her husband. “What has he done to you! Hush! Hush!” She brushed his tears away with frantic hand, sat down and rocked him back and forth. “Hush, my beloved! My beautiful! Oh, look at his hand!”

“I’m harboring a fiend!” the implacable voice raged. “A butcher! And you’re protecting him! Those hands of his will beat me yet! I know! My blood warns me of this son! This son! Look at this child! Look what he’s done! He’ll shed human blood like water!”

“You’re stark, raving mad!” She turned upon him angrily. “The butcher is yourself! I’ll tell you that to your face! Where he’s in danger I won’t yield, do you understand? With everything else have your way, but not with him!”

“Hanh! you have your reasons! But I’ll beat him while I can.”

“You won’t touch him!”

“No? We’ll see about that!”

“You won’t touch him, do you hear?” Her voice had become as quiet and as menacing as a trigger that, locked and at rest, held back by a hair incredible will, incredible passion. “Never!”

“You tell me that?” His voice seemed amazed. “Do you know to whom you speak?”

“It doesn’t matter! And now leave us!”

“I?” Again that immense surprise. As though one had dared to question a volcanic and incalculable force, and by questioning made it question itself. “To me? You speak to me?”

“To you. Indeed to you. Go out. Or I shall go.”

“You?”

“Yes, both of us.”

With terrified, tear-blurred eyes, David watched his father’s body shake as if some awful strife were going on within him, saw his head lunge forward, his mouth open to speak, once, again, then grow pale and twitch, and finally he turned without a word and stumbled up the parlor steps.

His mother sat for a moment without moving, then quivered and burst into tears, but brushed them off.

Yussie was still standing there, mute and frightened, his blood smeared over his chin.

“Sit there a moment.” She rose and set David on a chair. “Come here you poor child,” she said to Yussie.

“He kicked me righd on de nose!”

“Hush!” She led Yussie to the sink, and wiped his face with the end of a wet towel. “There, now you feel better.” And wetting the towel again, came over to David and set him on her lap.

“He hit me first.”

“Now hush! We won’t say anything more about it.” She patted the lacerated wrist with the cold towel. “Oh! my child!” she moaned biting her lips.

“I wanna go opstai’s,” blubbered Yussie. “I’m gonna tell my modder on you.” He snatched up the clothes hanger from the floor. “Waid’ll I tell my modder on you, yuh gonna gid it!” He flung the door open and ran out bawling.

His mother, sighing painfully, shut the door after him, and began undoing David’s shirt. There were angry red marks on his breast and shoulders. She touched them. He whimpered with pain.

“Hush!” she murmured again and again. “I know. I know, beloved.”

She undressed him, fetched his nightgown and slipped it over him. The cold air on his bruises had stiffened his shoulders and hands. He moved stiffly, whimpering.

“It really hurts now, doesn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes.” He felt himself wanting to sniffle.

“Poor darling, let me put you to bed.” She set him on his feet.

“I have to go now. Numbuh one.”

“Yes.”

She led him into the bathroom, lifted the toilet-seat. Urination was painful, affording relief only as a mournful sigh affords relief. His whole body shuddered as his bladder relaxed. A new sense of shyness invaded him; he crept furtively around to stand with his back to her, contracted when she pulled the chain above his head. He went out into the bright kitchen again, into the dark bedroom, and got into bed. There was a lingering, weary sadness in the first chill of the covers.

“And now sleep,” she urged, bending down and kissing him. “And a better day.”

“Stay here.”

“Yes. Of course.” She sat down and gave him her hand.

He curled his fingers around her thumb and lay staring up at her, his eyes drawing her features out of deep shadow. From time to time a sudden gasp would shake him, as though the waves of grief and pain had run his being’s length and were returning now from some remote shore.

XI

DECEMBER sunlight, porous and cloudy, molten on upper window panes. Though it was still early in the afternoon, the tide of cold shade had risen high on wooden houses and brick. Grey clots of snow still clung under the lee of the battered curb. The air was cold yet windless. Winter. To the left of the doorway a sewer steamed.

Noises to the right. He peered out. Before the tailor shop near the corner, a cluster of boys had gathered. Did he dare go over? What if Yussie were among them? He tried to find him. No, he wasn’t there. Then he could go over for a little while. He’d come back before Yussie came. Yes.

He drew near, warily. That was Sidney, Yonk. He knew them. The others? They lived around the corner maybe.

Sidney was in front; the rest followed him. David stood watching them.

“Wanna play?” Sidney asked.

“Yea.”

“So git back of de line. Foller de leader. Boom! Boom! Boom!” He set the pace.

David fell into step behind the last boy. They marched cross the street in single file and stopped before a tall hydrant.

“Jump on Johnny Pump!” commanded Sidney leaping up on the two stumpy arms of the fire-plug. “One two t’ree! Yee!” He jumped off.

In their turn, the rest leaped up, and then ran after him, shouting. Sidney zig-zagged back and forth across the street, lurching against ash-cans, leaping up and down stoops, stepping only on lines in the pavement, and obeying every stray whim that drifted through his head. David liked the game.

Arrived at the barber-pole, Sidney waited for his breathless cohorts to draw up.

“Follow de blue one,” he ordered, and beginning at the bottom of the blue spiral, wound around and round the pole until he stood tiptoe and the band he traced was beyond his reach. When the others had accomplished this feat, he crouched down, crept under the corbel of the barber-shop window, and when he reached the end, poked his head into the doorway and chanted in a croaking voice: “Chickee de cop, behin, de rock. De monkey’s in de ba’ba shop!” And he fled.

The rest squealed the words as he had done, but with increasing haste and diminishing lustiness and sped after him. By the time David’s turn had come, the barber was already at the threshold fuming with irritation. David mutely skirted the doorway and scurried on.

“He didn’ say it!” they jeered.

“Sca’cat w’yntcha say it?” Sidney rebuked him.

“I couldn’t,” he grinned apologetically. “He wuz stannin’ dere awreddy.”

“Foller de leader nex’ time!” Sidney warned him.

Chagrined, David resolved to do better, and thereafter followed faithfully all his leader’s antics, not even balking at running up and down the wooden stairs that led into the ice-man’s cellar.

The game had reached a high peak of excitement. The boy immediately preceding David had just rolled over the lower of two railings before the tailor’s shop, and now it was David’s turn. He grasped the bar, leaned against it, as the rest had done, and began a slow and cautious spin about it. In that strange moment of chaos when house-top and sky hung upside down and the others seemed standing on their heads in air, the inverted face of a man passed through and revolved with the revolving space. A glimpse of black pits, his nostrils, fat cheeks under the rim of his derby, all moving below legs. “Funny,” he thought as the soles of his feet landed on the pavement again. “Upside down like that. Funny.”

He glanced casually after the retreating figure.

Right side up now like everybody else. But — Wide shoulders, grey coat. That derby. That was — he struggled against the ineluctable recognition. No! No! Not him! But he walked like … His hands in his pockets. It was! It was!—

“Hey, c’mon!” Sidney called out impatiently.

But never budging, David stared straight forward. Now the man turned to cross the street, his face in profile.

It was! It was Luter! He was going to his house.

“Waddayuh lookin’ at?” Sidney was provoked. “Doncha wanna play?”

David wrenched himself from his trace. “Yea! Yea! Sure I wanna play.”

He ran into his place in the rank, but a moment later forgot where he was and gazed toward his house in terror. Luter had reached the doorway now, was going in, was gone.

That game now. Oh! That game now! No! No! Foller de leader! Play!

“Hurry up!” said Sidney, “It’s your chanst.”

David looked at him blankly. “W’a wuz yuh doin’, I didn’ see.”

“Aaa!” Disgustedly. “Jump down ’em two steps.”

David climbed up, jumped down, landed with a jarring thud, and followed after.

He knew it! He knew it! That’s why he had come. That game! He was going to make her play now. Like Annie. In the closet!..

“Hey, you ain’ gonna play, dat’s all!”

David started guiltily to see the rest waiting for him again.

“Don’ led ’im play, Sid.” They turned on him.

“He ain’ even follerin’.”

“Yuh big dope, yuh can’ even do nuttin’.”

“Gid odda hea.”

A sudden shout and then the patter of running feet distracted them. They looked to see who it was.

“Hey give us a game!”

It was Yussie, heading toward them. At the sight of him, David began edging away, but Yussie had already spied him.

“Yee!” he squealed delightedly, “Wadda lickin’ you god!”

“Who god?” Sidney asked.

“He god!” He pointed to David. “Hey, Sidney, you shoulda see! Bing! his fodder wend. Bang! An’ he laid down, an’ he wen’ Yow!”

The others began to laugh.

“Ow!” Yussie capered about for their further benefit. “Please, papa, lemme go! Ooh lemme go! Bang! Annudder smack he gabe ’im. Right inne ass!”

“Wad ’e hitcha fuh?” They circled about him.

“He hid ’im becuz he kicked me righd inna nose,” crowed Yussie. “Right over hea, an’ made blood.”

“Yuh led ’im gid away wid it?”

“I ain’ gonna,” growled Yussie waiting for further encouragement.

“Gib’m a fighd, Yussie!” They raised an eager cry.

“G’wan Yussie, bust’m one!”

“Righd inna puss!”

At the sight of David backing away, Yussie doubled his fists and screwed up his face pugnaciously. “C’mon, I’ll fightcha.”

“G’wan, yuh big cowid!” they taunted.

“I don’ wanna fighd,” he whimpered, looking about for a way of retreat. There was none. They had completely encircled him.

“Don’ led ’im ged away, Yussie! Give ’im two, four, six, nine!”

Egged on, Yussie began hammering his shoulders. “Two, four, six, nine, I c’n beatchoo any old time!”

His fists struck the separate cores of yesterday’s bruises. The places where the clothes-hanger had landed rayed out in pain. Tears sprang to his eyes. He cowered.

“He’s cryin’!” they jeered.

“Look ad ’im cryin’.”

“Waaa!”

“Cry baby, cry baby suck yer mudder’s tiddy!” one of them began. “Cry baby, cry baby, suck yer mudder’s tiddy.” The rest took up the burden.

The tears streaming down his face, David groped his way blindly through them. They opened a gap to let him pass and then followed him still chanting.

“Cry baby, cry baby, suck yer mudder’s tiddy!”

He began running. With a loud whoop of glee, they pursued. In a moment, someone had clutched his coat-belt and was yanking him to a halt. The pack closed in. “Ho, hussy!” they hooted, prancing about him. “Ho op!”

And suddenly a blind, shattering fury convulsed him. Why were they chasing him? Why? When he couldn’t turn anywhere — not even upstairs to his mother. He wouldn’t let them! He hated them! He bared his teeth and screamed, tore lose from the boy who was dragging at his belt and lunged at him. Every quivering cell was martialed in that thrust. Before his savage impact, the other reeled back, tripped over his own feet and fell, arching to the ground. His head struck first, a muffled distant jar like a blast deep underground. His arms flopped down beside him, his eyes snapped shut, he lay motionless. With a grunt of terror, the rest stared down at him, their faces blank, their eyes bulging. David gasped with horror and fled toward his house.

At his doorway, he threw a last agonized glance over his shoulders. Attracted by the cries of the children, the tailor had come running out of his shop and was now bending over the boy. The rest were dancing up and down and yelling:

“Dere he is! In dat house! He done it!”

The tailor waved his fist threatening. “Bestit!” he shouted. “I’ll give you! Vait! A polizman I’ll get!”

David flew into the hallway. A policeman! He grew faint with terror. What had he done! What had he done! A policeman was coming. Hide! Hide! Upstairs. No! No! He was there. That game. He would tell. Where? Any place. He dove behind the bannister and under the stairs. No! They would look for him there. He darted out. Where? Up. No! Trapped, frenzied, he stared wildly about him … The door.… No! No! Not there! No!.. Must … No! No!.. Policeman … Run out … No, they’d catch … Thought, fear and flight, rebellion and submission, alternated through his head in sharp, feverish pulses. Must! Must! Must! His mind screamed down opposition, and he sprang to the cellar door and pulled it open — Darkness like a cataract, inexhaustible, monstrous.

“Mama!” he moaned, peering down, “Mama!”

He dipped his foot into night, feeling for the stair, found it, pulled the door shut behind him. Another step. He clung to the wall. A third. The unseen strands of a spider’s web yielded against his lip. He recoiled in loathing, spat out the withered taste. No further. No! No further. He was trembling so, he could barely stand. Another step and he would fall. Weakly, he sat down.

Darkness all about him now, entire and fathomless night. No single ray threaded it, no flake of light drifted through. From the impenetrable depths below, the dull marshy stench of surreptitious decay uncurled against his nostrils. There was no silence here, but if he dared to listen, he could hear tappings and creakings, patterings and whispers, all furtive, all malign. It was horrible, the dark. The rats lived there, the hordes of nightmare, the wobbly faces, the crawling and misshapen things.

XII

HE GRITTED his teeth with the strain. Minutes had passed while he willed in a rigid pounding trance — willed that Luter would come down, willed that Luter would leave his mother. But on the stairs outside the cellar door all was still as before. Not a voice, not a footstep could he conjure out of the silence. Exhausted, he slumped back against the edge of the stair. But his ears had sharpened. He could hear sounds that he couldn’t hear before. But not above him now — below him. Against his will he sifted the nether dark. It was moving — moving everywhere on a thousand feet. The stealthy horrible dark was climbing the cellar stairs, climbing toward him. He could feel its ghastly emanation wreathing about him in ragged tentacles. Nearer. The foul warmth of its breath. Nearer. The bloated grisly faces. His jaws began to chatter. Icy horror swept up and down his spine like a finger scratching a comb. His flesh flowed with terror.

— Run! Run!

He clawed his way up the gritty stairs, fumbled screaming for the doorknob. He found it, burst out with a sob of deliverance and flung himself at the light of the doorway.

— Out! Out! Before any body comes.

Down the stoop and running.

— No! That way, school! That house! Other way!

At the corner, he swerved toward the right toward less familiar streets.

— Light! Light in the streets! Could see now. Could look … Man there … No policeman … No one chasing … Could walk now.

The keen, cold-scented air revived him, filtered through his coat, quickening the flesh beneath. The swift and brittle light on corners and upper stories comforted him. Things were again steadfast and plain. With each quick breath he took, a hoop of terror snapped from his chest. He stopped running, dropped into a panting walk.

— Could stay here now … No one chasing … Could stay, could go … Next block, what?

He turned a corner and entered a street much like his own — brick houses and wooden houses — but no stores.

— Want different one … Could go next.…

At the next corner he stopped with a cry of delight and gazed about him. Telegraph poles! Why hadn’t he come here before? On each side of the street, they stretched away, the wires on their crosses swinging into the sky. The street was wide, divided by a seamed and frozen mudgutter. At one end, the houses thinned out, faltering into open fields. The weathered poles crowded up the hill of distance into a sheen of frayed cloud. He laughed, filling his eyes with dappled reach, his lungs with heady openness.

— They go way and away … Way, way, way.… Could follow.

He patted the stout wooden pillar near his hand, examined the knots, darker than the grey, thrust at its patient bulk and laughed again.

— Next one.… Race him!.. Hello Mr. High Wood.… Good-bye, Mr. High Wood. I can go faster.… Hello, Second Mr. High Wood.… Good-bye Second Mr. High Wood … Can beat you …

They dropped behind him. Three.… Four.… Five … Six.… drew near, floated by in silence like tall masts. Seven.… Eight.… Nine … Ten.… He stopped counting them. And with them, dwindling in the past, all he feared, all he loathed and fled from: Luter, Annie, the cellar, the boy on the ground. He remembered them still, yes, but they were tiny now, little pictures in his head that no longer writhed into his thoughts and stung him, but stood remote and harmless — something heard about someone else. He felt as if they would vanish from his mind altogether, could he only reach the top of that hill up which all the poles were striding. He hurried on, skipping sometimes out of sheer deliverance, sometimes waving at a laggard pole, gurgling to himself, giggling at himself, absurdly weary.

And now the houses straggled, giving way to long stretches of empty lots. On either side of the street, splotches of yeasty snow still plastered the matted fields. On ledges above the rocks, the black talons of crooked trees clawed at the slippery ground. At the doorway of a chicken coop, behind a weathered, ramshackle house, a rooster clucked and gawked and strutted in. The level sidewalks had ended long ago; the grey slabs underfoot were cracked and rugged, and even these were petering out. A sharp wind was rising across the open lots, catching up cloaks of dust, golden in the slanting sun. It was growing colder and lonelier, the wintry bleakness of the hour before sunset, the earth contracting, waiting for night—

— Time to look back.

— No.

— Time to look back.

— Only to the end of that hill. There where the clouds fell.

— Time to look back.

He glanced over his shoulder and suddenly halted in surprise. Behind him as well as before, the tall spars were climbing into the sky.

— Funny. Both ways.

He turned about, gazing now behind him, now before.

— Like it was a swing. Didn’t know.

His mood was buckling.

— Same. Didn’t know.

His legs were growing tired.

— It’s far away on the other side.

Between coat-pocket and sleeve one wrist was cold, the other was throbbing.

— And it’s far away on the other side.

The tubers of pain under the skin of his shoulders were groping into consciousness now.

— And it’s just the same.

Slowly, he began retracing his steps.

— Can go back.

Despite growing weariness, he quickened his pace.

They were all gone now, Luter was gone; they had finished that game. He and his mother. Could go back now. And the policeman was gone, couldn’t find him. Could go back. And his mother would be there, yes, waiting for him. Didn’t hate her now. Where were you? she would ask. No place. You frightened me; I couldn’t find you. Wouldn’t say. Why don’t you tell me where you were? Because. Why? Because — But must get back before his father came. Better hurry.

Houses were gathering together again.

And I looked out of the window, and I called, David, David, and I couldn’t find you. Wouldn’t tell her. Maybe she even went down stairs into the street. But if the policeman told her. She wouldn’t tell his father. No. When he got into his street, he’d call her. She’d look out of the window. What? Wait in the hall, I’m coming upstairs. She’d wait and he’d run past the cellar. Hate it! Wish there were houses without cellars.

The sky was narrowing; houses had closed their ranks. Overhead, a small flock of sparrows, beading the wires between two telegraph poles, tweaked the single dry string of their voices. On the railing of a porch, a grey cat stopped licking a paw and studied them gravely, then eyed David as he passed.

Milk-supper, maybe, when he came upstairs. Sour cream, yum! Break pieces of bread into it. Sour cream with farmer-cheese. Mmm! Sour cream with eggs. Sour cream with what else? Borscht … Strawberries.… Radishes … Bananas … Borscht, strawberries, radishes, bananas. Borscht, strawberries, apples and strudel. No. They didn’t eat with sour cream. Sour. Cream. Sour. Cream. Like it, like it, like it. I — like — it. I like cake but I don’t like herring. I like cake, but I don’t like what? I like cake, but I don’t like, like, like, herring. I don’t don’t — How far was it still?

The sidewalks were level again.

Luter liked herring, don’t like Luter. Luter likes herring, don’t like Luter. Luter likes — would he be there to-night? He said maybe. Maybe he wasn’t coming. Wish he never comes. Never comes, never comes. Wishee, wishee, never comes, all on a Monday morning — How far was it still?

Eagerly, he scanned the streets ahead of him. Which one was it. Which? Which one was — Long street. Long street, lot of wooden houses. On this side. Yes. Go through the other side. Then other corner … Right away, right away. Be home right away … This one?… Didn’t look like … Next one bet … Giddyap, giddyap, giddyap.… One little house … two little house … three little house … Corner coming, corner coming, corner — Here?

— Here? This one? Yes. Looked different. No. Same one. Wooden houses. Yes.

He turned the corner, hastened toward the opposite one.

— Same one. But looked a little teenchy weenchy bit different. Same one though.

But at the end of the block, uncertainty would not be dispelled. Though he conned every house on either side of the crossing, no single landmark stirred his memory. They were all alike — wooden houses and narrow sidewalks to his right and left. A shiver of dismay ran through him.

— Thought this—? No. Maybe went two. Then, when he ran. Wasn’t looking and went two. Next one. That would be it. Find it now. Mama is waiting. Next one. Quick. And then turn. That was. He’d see. Has to be.

He broke into a tired jog.

— Yes, the next one. That big yellow house on the corner. He’d see it. He’d see it. Yea! How he’d holler when he saw it. There it is! There’s my street! But if — if it wasn’t there. Must be! Must be!

He ran faster, sensing beside him the soft pad of easy-loping fear. That next corner would be haven or bay, and as he neared it, he burst into the anguished spring of a flagging quarry—

— Where? Where was it?

His eyes, veering in every direction, implored the stubborn street for an answer it would not yield. And suddenly terror pounced.

“Mama!” The desolate wail split from his lips. “Mama!” The aloof houses rebuffed his woe. “Mama!” his voice trailed off in anguished abandonment. And as if they had been waiting for a signal, the streets through his tear-blurred sight began stealthily to wheel. He could feel them turning under his feet, though never a house changed place — backward to forward, side to side — a sly, inexorable carousel.

“Mama! Mama!” he whimpered, running blindly through a street now bleak and vast as nightmare.

A man turned the corner ahead of him and walked briskly away on clicking heels. For a tense, delirious instant, he seemed no other than his own father; he was as tall. But then the film snapped open. It was someone else. His coat was greyer, he swung his arms and he walked erect. His father always hunched forward, arms bound to his side.

But with the last of his waning strength, he spurted after him. Maybe he would know. Maybe he could tell him.

“Mister!” he gasped for breath, “Mister!”

The man slackened his pace and glanced over his shoulder. At the sight of the pursuing David, he stopped and turned about in quizzical surprise. Under a long, heavy nose, he had a pointed mustache, the waxed blonde of horn.

“What’s the matter, sonny,” he asked in loud good humor. “What’re you up to?”

“I’m losted.” David sobbed.

“Oh!” He chuckled sympathetically. “Losted, eh? And where do you live?”

“On a hunnder ’n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt,” he answered tremulously.

“Where?” he bent his ear down, puzzled. “What Street?”

“On Boddeh Stritt.”

“Bodder Street?” He screwed a tip of his mustache to a tighter pitch and regarded David with an oblique, critical eye. “Bodder Street. Can’t say that I’ve ever — Oh! Heh! Heh!” He exploded good-natured again. “You mean Potter Street. Heh! Heh! Bodder Street!”

“Boddeh Stritt,” David reiterated weakly.

“Yea!” he said decisively. “Now listen to me.” He took David’s shoulder. “See that street there?” He pointed to the way David had come. “That one. Now see the street after it — a little further away? That’s two. Now you go one street, two streets, but—” and his finger threatened—“don’t stop there. Go another one. See? Another one.”

David nodded dubiously.

“Yea!” he said reassuringly. “And as soon as you’re there, ask anybody where one twenty six is. They’ll tell you. All right?” he asked heartily, giving David a slight nudge in the desired direction.

Not too reassured but braced with a little more hope than before, David set out, urging rebellious legs into a plodding trot. He was a big man, that man, he must know. Maybe it was Poddeh Street, like he said. Didn’t sound the same, but maybe it was. Everybody said it different anyhow. His mother said Boddeh Stritt, like that. But she couldn’t talk English. So his father told her Boddeh Street, like that. And now the man said Poddeh Street. Puh. Puh. Poddeh. Buh. Buh. Boddeh. Corner is coming … One corner. Gutter is coming … One gutter.

Next and next, he said. Ooh, if he could only see that yellow house on the corner! Ooh, how he’d run! There was a dog in it with long white hair and he ran after a rubber ball. Here, Jack! Here, Jack! Grrrrrh! In his mouth. Everybody knew him. Everybody knew Boddeh Stritt. There was a grocery store in it and a candy store in it and a barber shop. The barber had a big mustache like that man’s, only black. And a big awning on the store. He wasn’t Jewish. In the window, he had another barber, only he wasn’t real and he had a bottle in his hand and his other fingers were like that — round. And he looked at you with the bottle in his hand wherever you went. Walk this way, that way, and he watched — Corner already. Gutter already.

Next and ask. Next and ask. Ooh, if he saw it. Ooh!

“Ooh, mama!” he prayed aloud. “I’m ascared to look, ooh mama, make it on de nex’ one!”

But look he did. The moment he had reached it — up and down, as far as the eye could see: Again a street as alien as any he had ever passed, and like the others, with squat, monotonous flanks receding into vacancy, slack with risen shadow. He didn’t cry out; he didn’t sob. A moment longer he stared. All hope collapsed within him, fell, jarring in his heart. With stiff, tranced body, he groped blindly toward the vague outline of a railing before a basement, and leaning his brow against the cold iron wept in anguish too great to bear. Only the sharp rush of his breath sheared the silence.

Minutes passed. He felt he would soon lose his grip of the iron uprights. At length, he heard behind him slow footsteps that drawing near, scuffed shortly to a halt. What good was looking up? What good was doing anything? He was locked in nightmare, and no one would ever wake him again.

“Here! Here!” A woman’s crisp, almost piqued voice sounded above him, followed the next moment by prim tap on the shoulder. “Young man!”

David paid no heed.

“Do you hear me?” the voice gathered severity. “What is it?” And now the hand began forcing him away from the railing.

He turned about, head rolling in misery.

“Gracious me!” She raised a fending hand. “Whatever in the world has happened?”

Quivering, he looked at her, unable to answer. She was old, dwarfish, yet curiously compact. She wore green. A dark green hat skimmed high over a crest of white hair. From her hand hung a small black shopping bag, only vaguely bulging.

“Gracious!” she repeated, startled into scolding, “Won’t you answer?”

“I–I’m losted,” he sobbed, finding his breath at last. “Aaa! I’m losted.”

“There! There! There! You poor thing!” and with a quick bird-like tug at a pince-nez hanging from a little reel under her coat, she fixed him in magnified grey eyes. “Tt! Tt! Tt! Don’t you know where you live?”

“Yea, I know,” he wept.

“Well, tell me.”

“A hunner ’n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt.”

“Potter Street? Why you silly child, this is Potter Street. Now, stop your crying!” A little grey finger went up.

“Id ain’d!” he moaned.

“What isn’t?” The eyes behind the lenses contracted authoritatively.

“Id ain’d Boddeh Stritt!” He wept doggedly.

“Please don’t rub your eyes that way! Do you mean this isn’t Potter Street?”

“Id ain’d Boddeh Stritt!”

“Bodder! Bodder! Are you sure?”

“Yeah!” his voice trailed off.

“Bodder, Bother, Botter, try and think!”

“It’s Boddeh Stritt!”

“And this isn’t it?” she asked hopefully.

“Naaaah!”

“Oh, dear! Oh, dear! What shall we do?”

“Waa!” he wailed, “W’eas mine mama! I wan’ mine mama!”

“Now you must stop crying,” she scolded again. “You simply must! Where’s your handkerchief?”

“Waaa!”

“Oh, dear! How trying you are!” she exclaimed and then as if struck with a new thought, “Wait!” She brightened and began hastily rummaging in her little black bag. “I have something for you!” She brought out a large, yellow banana. “Here!” And when he refused. “Now take it!” She thrust it into his fingers. “You like bananas, don’t you?”

“Aaa! I wan’ my mama!”

“I’ll have to take you to—” she broke off. “I’m going to take you to your mother.”

“You ain’d,” he wailed. “You ain’d!”

“Yes, I am,” she said with a positive nod. “This very moment.”

He stared at her incredulously.

“We’re going now. Hold your banana tightly!”

XIII

“AND so you live by dis way and dat way and straight from the school?” Mimicking him, the policeman’s hand glided about.

The old woman had tricked him. She had led him to a police-station and left him. He had tried to run, but they had caught him. And now he stood weeping before a bare-headed policeman with a gold badge. A helmeted one stood behind him.

“And Boddeh Street is the name and you can’t spell it?”

“N-no!”

“Mmm! Boddeh? Body Street, eh? Better look at the map.” He pushed himself back from the railing. “Know it?” he inquired of the helmeted one. “Body Street — sounds like the morgue.”

“Near the school on Winston Place? Boddeh? Pother? Say, I know where he lives! Barhdee Street! Sure, Barhdee! That’s near Parker and Oriol — Alex’s beat. Ain’t that it?”

“Y-yes.” Hope stirred faintly. The other names sounded familiar. “Boddeh Stritt.”

“Barhdee Street!” The helmeted one barked good-naturedly. “Be-gob, he’ll be havin’ me talk like a Jew. Sure!”

“Well!” The bareheaded one sighed. “You were just kiddin’ us, weren’t ye? But look, we ain’t mad. We’ll get your mama in a jiffy.” He nodded to the helmeted one. “See if he wants to do number one or somethin’? The mess that — last — one made—” His voice trailed off as he moved to the telephone.

“Yep!” The helmeted one patted David on the shoulder. “We could use a matron.” And heartily. “C’mon, me boy, yer all roit.” And led him under a low archway, past a flight of stairs and into a bleak, bare, high-ceilinged room. Chairs lined the walls. Bars ribbed the tall windows. They stopped before a white door, went into a tiled-floor toilet that reeked with nostril-searing cleanliness. Beside the doorless alcoves, stretched a drab grey slab, corrugated by a dark trickle of water that splashed into the trough below.

“Step up close an’ do yer dooty, sonny me boy.” He propelled the reluctant David toward the urinal. “C’mon, now. It’s recess time. Sure, I’ve a lad of me own in school.” He turned on the faucet in the wash bowl. “And ye do it with yer mittens on! Say, yer all roit! That’s the way! Git a good one out o’ ye. What would yer mama be sayin, if she found ye were after wetthin yer drawz? This is a divil of a joint, she’d say. What kind of cops are yiz at all? Sure!” He shut off the faucet. “No more’n three shakes, mind ye!”

And David was led out again into the bleak room.

“Any seat in the house, me lad — the winder there — tha-a-ts it. Yer a quiet kid. And we’ll page ye the minute yer mother comes. Ther-r-r!” He turned and went out.

Drearily, David gazed about him. The loneliness of the huge room, made ten-fold lonelier by the bare, steep walls, the long rows of vacant chairs sunken in shadow, the barred windows barring in vacancy, oppressed him with a despair so heavy, so final, it numbed him like a drug or a drowsiness. His listless eyes turned toward the window, looked out. Back yards … grey scabs of ice … on the dead grass … ended in a wall of low frame houses, all built of clapboards, all painted a mud-brown, all sawing the sky with a rip-tooth slant of gabled roofs. Shades were half drawn. From all their chimneys smoke unwreathed into the wintry blue.

Time was despair, despair beyond tears.… He understood it now, understood it all, irrevocably, indelibly. Desolation had fused into a touchstone, a crystalline, bitter, burred reagent that would never be blunted, never dissolved. Trust nothing. Trust nothing. Trust nothing. Wherever you look, never believe. Whatever anything was or did or said, it pretended. Never believe. If you played hide’n’-go-seek, it wasn’t hide’n’-go-seek, it was something else, something sinister. If you played follow the leader, the world turned upside down and an evil face passed through it. Don’t play; never believe. The man who had directed him; the old woman who had left him here; the policeman; all had tricked him. They would never call his mother, never. He knew. They would keep him there. That rat cellar underneath. That rat cellar! That boy he had pushed was still. Coffin-box still. They knew it. And they knew about Annie. They made believe they didn’t, but they knew. Never believe. Never play. Never believe. Not anything. Everything shifted. Everything changed. Even words. Words, you said. Wanna, you said. I wanna. Yea. I wanna. What? You know what. They were something else, something horrible! Trust nothing. Even sidewalks, even streets, houses, you looked at them. You knew where you were and they turned. You watched them and they turned. That way. Slow, cunning. Trust noth—

On the stairs outside, heavy feet tramped down, accompanied by a rhythmic clacking as if some hollow metal were bouncing against the uprights under the bannister rail—

“C’mon, Steve!” A loud voice dwindled into the room beyond. “Kick in fer a change!”

And a blurred reply met blurred rejoinders and laughter. Then the stalwart rap of dense heels approached. The helmeted one switched on the lights, revealing another beside him, a man in plain clothes, thick-set, lipless and impassive, who swung in his hand a large tin dinner-pail. The new-comer turned quizzically to the helmeted one.

“He did?”

“He did so.”

“Well!” ominously.

“A banana that size! And if I hadn’t winked me oiyes quicker than a flash, he’d have poked it in like a spoon into a stew!”

“A cop-fighter, hunh?”

“And a bad one, I’m tellin’ ye! Me peepers are still watherin’! And he’s afther kickin’ me in the brisket till I’m blue as me own coat!”

“Hmm! Maybe we better not git ’im any o’ dat chawklit cake.”

“Well, now!” The helmeted one levered up his helmet to scratch his smoky red hair. “What d’ ye think? He’s been a good boy, since.”

“Iz zat so?”

“Mmm! Quiet as a mouse!”

“Well, ’at makes it different. D’ye like chawklit cake? W’at’s ’is name?”

“David. David — er— David himself.”

“D’ye like chawklit cake, I ast ye?”

“N-no,” fearfully.

“W-a-a-t?” He growled, his eyes narrowing incredulously. “Yuh — don’—like chawklit — cake? Owoo! We gotta keep ye hea den! Dere’s no two ways about it!” He uttered a series of terrifying hissing noises by pinching his air-puffed nostrils.

David cringed.

“He don’ like chawk—”

“Whisht!” The helmeted one kicked the other’s heel. “Sure he does! It’s nothin’ but a bit o’ shoiness that’s kaipin’ him from—”

“I wan’ my mama!” David had begun to whimper. “I wan’ my mama! Mama!”

“Arrh!” The helmeted one exploded. “Now look what yev started, ye divil of a flat-foot! Torturin’ ’im for nothin’ at all. Froitinin’ him out of his wits the way he’ll never know his own mother when he see’s ’er!”

“Who me?” Faint amusement puffed his lip out. “W’y I hardly looked at ’im cock-eyed. Wat’re yuh talkin’ about!”

“It’s yer ugly mug that does it! Go on with ye! None o’ yer guff!” He pushed the other man out of the room. “Don’t mind him me lad! He’s nothin but a harmless bull bellowin’ t’ hear himself bellow! God mend ’im! We’ll get ye yer mother an’ yer chawklit cake too! Never fear! Now you be quiet like a good lad!” He grinned, followed the other man out.

“Mama!” He moaned. “Mama! Mama!”

It was true! All that he feared was true. They would keep him there — Keep him there always! They would never call his mother! And now that he knew, it was too late. He had learned never to trust too late. He lowered his head and sobbed.

We-e-e-e-e-e!

From somewhere a whistle began blowing — a remote, thin blast that suddenly opened into a swooping screech and as suddenly died away.

Whistles? He raised his head. Factory whistles! The others? None! Too far! So far she was. So far away! — But she heard them — she heard the other whistles that he couldn’t hear. The whistles he heard in the summer time. She heard them now. Maybe she looked out of the window — now — this moment! Looked down into the street, up and down the street, searched, called. There he was — outside — on the curb. Be two Davids, be two! One here, one outside on the curb. Now watch! Wait till she looks out! Now watch! See? There she is behind the curtain. Yes, that thick lace curtain — only in the winter it was there. Now she parts them — two hands like that — stoops. See? Her face close to the pane. Cold. And, wrrrr! Up! Bet a shawl is on her. David! David! Come up! Why do you wait? Because! Why? She would have forgotten. That — that door, mama. Oh, she’d laugh. Silly one! Come up! I’ll wait! And then he’d stand on the stoop. One-two-three. Till she crossed the frontroom. One. Two. Three and the kitchen. And then go in. Mama? Yes, I’m here, she’d call down, Yes, come on! Run past the door. Bing! No. Not run if she’s there. Be there too quick. One step and one step. Two steps and two steps. Three steps and—

“Hurhmm!”

Chuckling the helmeted one butted through the mist of dreaming. “Is it the mounted pollies y’are with that leg up?”

David gaped at him without answering. About him vision tumbled into chaos.

“Or a fly-cop on his wheel?” He continued, manipulating imaginary handle-bars. “What were ye chasin’? One o’ thim noo Stootzes? But look what oiv got fer ye.” He uncurled beefy red paws — a square of brown chocolate cake in one and a red apple in the other. “How does that suit ye?”

He began crying again.

“Hey—! Arrrh, yer a quair one! Here I’ve gone an’ got ye chawklit cake — in a beer saloon of all the damn places — an’ gotten ye apples, and there y’are cryin’ all over the precinct! What’s the matter?”

“W-w-w’istles!” he wailed. “W-wistles!”

“Whistles?

“Yeaa-a-aow!”

“Is it a whistle yer after?” He made a motion toward his pocket.

“N-n-o-o-o! B-blowin’!”

“Me?”

“No-o-o! My — my mama! Ow!”

“Orrch! Fergit it. Here’s a foin bit o’ cake fer ye. C’mon! Take it! And the apple. That’s the way! Forst ye eat one and then the other! Anhann! And I’ll git ye a sup o’ wawther and ye’ll be as snug as — No!” He bawled.

David had dropped both the cake and the apple. A voice! A voice he never hoped to hear again. A voice! He stared at the doorway rigid with hope.

“Now look what yev—” He stopped, turned round.

A light tread hurried toward them. Out of the slow blur of a myriad meaningless faces, one condensed into all meaning.

“David! David!”

“Mama!” He screamed leaping toward her. “Mama! Mama! Mama!”

She caught him up in her arms, moaning, pressed his cheek against her cold one. “David, beloved! David!”

“Mama! Mama!” The screaming of her name was itself sheer, stark ecstasy, but all bliss was outplumbed in the clasping of her neck.

“Well yer safe now be the looks of it,” came the voice at his back.

Still pressing him to her, she carried him into the outer room where the bareheaded one leaned against the rail watching them.

“Hmm, I see he knows his mama.”

“T-tanks so — so viel!” she stammered.

“Oh, that’s all right, lady. Glad to have a visitor once in a while. It’s pretty quiet here.”

“And lady,” the helmeted one came up, “I’m thinkin’ ye’d best put a tag on him, fer he sure had us up a tree with his Pother an’ Body an’ Powther! Now ye spell it bee — ay—”

“T’anks so viel!” she repeated.

“Oh!” He smiled crookedly, nodded. “Yer acquainted with it.”

The other man rested the corner of a grin on his finger nail.

“Now oi’ll tell ye an odd thing, Lieutenant,” said the helmeted one. “He’s after plaguin’ me about a whistle. Now it’s an odd thing I tell ye — would make a man be thinkin’. He said to me, he said. I’m after hearin’ me own mother’s whistle. Now would ye believe it? And she still a good ways off!”

“Did he?” The bareheaded man snorted with amusement. “The only whistle I heard was the four-ten over at Chandler crossing, and that was about—”

“Er—” his mother began timidly. “Herr — Mister. Ve — er — ve go?”

“Oh certainly, lady! Just walk right out any time.” He opened his arms in a flowing gesture. “He’s all yours.”

“T-tanks.” She said gratefully and turned to go.

“Hey, hold on a minute!” The helmeted one pursued them. “Would ye be leavin’ us without yer cake?” He pried it into David’s hand. “And yer apple? No? Too much? Well, I’ll kaip it fer ye till ye drop around again. Good-bye! And don’t ye go runnin’ after telegraph poles!”

XIV

THE doorway out! Freedom! The cold air of the street. The sky tightening with dusk. And she, carrying him, her face close to his! Things he never hoped to see again, bliss he never hoped to feel! Deliverance too enormous even to grasp!

“How did you—?” She stopped. “Do you want me to carry you, darling?”

“No, I can walk, Mama! I can walk, Mama! Mama! Mama!” The magic in the word seemed inexhaustible, gave him new strength. He laughed at the sheer joy of the sound.

She set him down. And hand in hand they walked as rapidly as his pace permitted.

“We’re not very far,” she informed him, “though far enough for a weary child. Now tell me, how did you ever stray into that place? How did you get there?”

“Somebody was chasing me, Mama, and I ran and I ran and I ran.” Claws of sudden fear grazed him. “Is he still?”

“Still? Who? Who was chasing you?”

“Yussie. And — and the other boys. They called me crybaby — crybaby because — Papa — hit — hit me. Yussie — he told.”

“He didn’t tell me that.”

“Is he — is he still, Mama?”

“What do you mean?”

“I only — only pushed because he was running after me. Mama, I didn’t want to make him still.”

“Oh! That boy? There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“No?” He bounded before her electrified with relief. “No? I didn’t? Mama-a-a!”

“Did you think you hurt him, you silly one?”

“I didn’t! I didn’t! I didn’t!” he cheered, “Oooh, I didn’t do anything!”

“No. Except to frighten me to death! But why didn’t you run upstairs if they were chasing you? Hymie said you ran inside. Where did you go?”

“Is this where we live?” They had turned a corner and he scanned the darkening street. “Doesn’t look like—?”

“No. Several blocks yet. Are you tired?”

“No mama!”

“We must hurry then or Albert will be there before us. He won’t know what’s happened to us when he comes into an empty house.”

“Who told you?”

“What?”

“Where I was.”

“A policeman.”

“Were you scared?”

“I was frantic!”

“Because the policeman?”

“No, because of you, silly child! I had just rushed weeping into the street when I met him.”

“A real policeman? For me? Did he tell you how— how to come?”

“He wrote it down for me. And people on the way directed me. He has it, that master in there.”

“Oh.”

“Yes! Now you tell me! First where did you go? Did you hide somewhere and run out again? What kept you from coming up?”

“I–I went — down — I went down in the cellar.” Buoyancy seeped out of him. His voice ended dully.

“The cellar?” She stopped in mid-stride to look down at him. “Of all the strange places! Why did you go there?”

“I don’t know — I don’t know. I wanted to — to hide from the — the policeman. Mama!” He suddenly whimpered in terror. “Mama!”

“What? What is it, sweet.” She gripped his hand. “Do you feel ill?”

“N-no.” He was wrestling feebly with himself. “N-no.”

“Frightened again? That cellar? I can’t understand why you’d want to go down — Oh, but let’s wait! Later, darling? You’ll tell me?” They walked rapidly awhile in silence. “Are you warm?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do there? In that — in that — Ach! I can’t say it! With the police?”

“They made me sit down. And first — first they took me to the toilet. And then the big policeman gave me the apple. And then the cake.”

“That’s a handsome cake!” She smiled down at him. “An American one. I couldn’t bake it myself. Do you know where you are now?”

He looked around at the twilit street. “We went a lot of blocks,” he said tentatively.

“Yes. But that street, that next one?”

He shook his head. In the thickening gloom, the street ahead looked as alien as any he had passed.

“That’s Boddeh Street,” she informed him. “Your school is that way, further off. But it’s too dark to see. Now two — three blocks that way—” She pointed to the left—“is where we live.”

“That way, Mama?” He stared incredulously. “This way!” He pointed to the right. “This way is my school.”

“That’s why you were lost! It’s the other way.”

“O-o-h!” A new wonder dragged him to a halt. “It — it’s turning, Mama! It’s turning round — back.”

“What?” Her tone was amused. “The street?”

“Yes! They stopped! Just now! The school — The school is over there now!”

“So it is. The streets turn, but you — not you! Little God!” Chuckling, she stooped, kissed him. “We must hurry, though! I left no word and it’s dark. If he gets there before we do, he’ll—” She broke off nervously. “Come!”

They crossed the street, turned their backs against the twilight and hurried into darkness. Lamps were already lit, street lamps, windows. They had met almost no one during their entire journey, and now against the wintry vacancy and the dark, David listened with immense gratitude to the click of his mother’s heels that measured the quicker shuffle-tripping of his own. Suppose he were alone? Heard only his own slight footsteps wrenched from the grip of quiet? Suppose his father—? No! He shivered, added the middle finger of his mother’s hand to the two he already held.

They neared the open lot. He knew where he was now, certain of every step. There was a wind that prowled over that area of rock and dead grass, that would spring at them when they passed it. And the wind did. He squinted into it. Beyond the patch of rock and dead grass, a bright rind of moon barely cleared the roof tops. He watched it till the next house overtook it and then looked away. A vague apprehension came over him. An hour ago, had he been by some miracle transplanted to this spot, he would have rushed home screaming for joy. But now, each familiar house that he passed — here was the one with the leaning palings; this was yellow long-boards in daylight and had a railed-in porch, this was brick and had an odd veined transom over the door — each was nearer home. And home — His fears reared up again. And suddenly he wished himself — but with his mother beside him — twice as far away as when they had left the police station.

“After next block, Mama?” He knew perfectly well how far his own house lay.

“Yes.” She was staring ahead eagerly.

“You know where the next street is, Mama?” He motioned to the side. “Over this way?”

“Yes.”

“I saw the — that box and those carriages.”

“Did you?”

“Yes. Are they going to — to move out now — You think?”

“I don’t know, darling. Perhaps they own the house. Why do you ask?”

He was silent a moment and then, “Is Papa home?”

“I hope not.”

“You — you — are you going to say — tell him?”

“What? Where you’ve been? Why of course!”

“Aaaaa!” His head dropped resentfully.

“What’s the matter?” She tugged his arm gently. “Don’t you want me to?”

“I–I thought you wouldn’t tell if — if we came home first — just before.”

“Why no, I was worried about Albert, that’s all. Are you afraid about having him know?”

“I–I was in a- a p’lice station — that’s why.”

“Well, what if you were? You’ve done nothing. Oh, you silly child! Being lost is no crime. Though I could blame others if I chose!”

There was a tight sound of restrained anger in her voice though David knew it was not directed against him.

“You won’t let him h-hit me?”

“Tt! Darling, I’ll never let him strike you again — neither he nor anyone if I can help it. There, are you satisfied? Now don’t be afraid any longer!”

David walked in silence awhile, mind reassured, heart not yet free from doubt.

“Mr. Luter— Mr. Luter isn’t going to come?”

“To-night? No.” Her pace slackened slightly. “What makes you think of that?”

“Will he come here, Mama? Come here anymore?”

“Why — Well— I don’t—” From confusion her voice condensed into suddenness. “Why do you ask?”

“I–I don’t like him. That’s why.”

“Oh, is that it?” She was silent a moment. And though they had entered their own block, her pace instead of quickening, slackened even more. When she spoke again, her voice was strangely cautious. “Did — did anyone else frighten you, beloved? Anyone else beside those bad boys?”

“N-no.” He felt his mind sharpen now, watchful. “No. Nobody else.”

“You’re sure? You — you saw nobody? Nothing that would frighten you?”

“I–I only saw the boys. And Yussie told them, and then they all began to — to chase me.”

“Of course. I’m glad there was nothing else. God knows that was enough!”

Her pace quickened again. Without eagerness, David singled out his own house among the dark ones. It struck him as odd that he should only have noticed now and at night that his house had a flat and not a gabled roof. They lived under the roof then, Yussie and Annie. Suppose Annie had looked out of the window when he made his mother look out in the police station. Suppose she was there now watching him! He shuddered, looked away.

“In our block, the first stores, Mama — the first stores begin.”

“Yes … And tell me, will I still have to stand in the hallway when you go down? Or have you seen how little there is to fear in cellars?”

“No!” Fear lunged within him. “No, Mama! You’ll have to wait — always!”

“How desperate you sound!”

“And I’m not going to play with — with anybody! Any more!”

“You’re not?”

“No! Never!”

He could feel his lips pouting despite himself, stretching out as if to loosen the tears. Another moment and he would have wept, but the hallway door was before him now, and now his mother pressed it open. Imperious terror dispersed his tears. He entered — thrust of warmth of the gaslit hallway, stagnant air suffused with the dusty, torpid odor of carpets. The cellar door was brown — closed again. For an instant he wondered whether he or another had shut it, but could not recall. Fear printed on his back and breast the cold, metallic squares of a wiry net. He shrank against his mother, clung to her till they mounted the carpeted stairs. She seemed not to have noticed.

“If he’s in,” she murmured aloud, “he’ll be distraught! After what I said to him last night! Hurry! He’ll think I’ve— But why not?” She appeared suddenly to remember. “Why won’t you play?”

“I don’t—” He faltered dully, evasively. “I don’t want to.” It no longer mattered.

She hurried up the stairs, tarried a moment at the landing till he reached her and then tried the door. Unlocked, it yielded — gave upon darkness. Alarm tightened her features. She entered.

“Albert!”

There was no answer … Only the soft shifting of embers in the stove. For a weird, spinning instant, David, lingering on the threshold, visualized his father gone, miraculously, forever gone.

“Albert!” She was groping toward the wall where the match-safe hung. “Albert!”

“Unh!” His startled groan came from the bedroom. “You? Genya!” For once his voice was stripped of harshness, stripped of pride, power, was nothing but a cry such as David might have uttered, alone in the dark, despairing. “Genya!”

“Oh! Thank God, you’re here!”

“Yes…” And the harshness returned and the inflexible pride, and the voice was again his father’s, awakened, surly. “Hmph! Where else would I be?”

She had struck a match and now she lit the mantle-light.

“I tried so hard to get back before you arrived! Were you worried?”

“I?” Deliberate, again, sardonic. “No … And so you decided to return did you? Even the fixed word wavers, eh? In the cold? In the empty streets at ni—”

“Return? Albert, what are you saying! I never went!” She hurried up the front room stairs. “Shut the door, David, darling! Take off your coat! Sit down!” She went inside. “I feared you’d think—!” And her voice was suddenly lowered.

David shed his coat, found a chair and listened morosely to the sounds in the bed-room. From the drift of the occasional words, snatches of phrases, exclamations that rose like crests above their low tones, he knew their conversation was not only about him, but about the night before. His mother was explaining, he guessed, where she had been, why she had gone. Of Luter, he could hear no mention made. He divined that no mention would be made. Finally, his father exclaimed in an impatient voice:

“Well, you’ve said enough! I take your word for it! That son of yours has to be watched day and night!”

“But it wasn’t his fault, Albert!”

“Mine then? Is that what you mean. Are you hinting that I’m to blame?”

“No! No! No! It’s the fault of no one! You’re right, there’s no more to say! Are you hungry?”

“Naturally.”

“I’ve made that veal the way you like it. And those shredded carrots. Do you want them to-night?”

“Hmm.”

David could hear her moving toward the frontroom, open the window. A few seconds later, she appeared, carrying two covered pots.

“To bed early to-night.” She came down, smiling solicitously. “To forget early.”

Silently, on stockinged feet, his father loomed into the threshold. His vest was unbuttoned, the neck-band of his shirt open on the pit of the strong, corded neck. Gripping the doorpost with lank, ink-spotted fingers, he blinked at the light, and then regarded David gloomily.

“And so you’re acquainted with the police now?”

David dropped his gaze. He hadn’t seen his father since last night when he was beaten. The face was still the face of a foe.

“Yes!” His mother laughed, looking round from the stove. “But in friendship only! Wait till I show you the cake they gave him. It’s in my pocket-book.”

“They gave him cake, eh?”

To David there was something peculiarly significant in the way his father uttered the words.

“Yes,” she continued cheerfully. “And how they must have laughed at my English!”

“How did you ever let him get so far? You’re always watching after him.”

“I don’t know. He was gone before I thought to look.”

“Hmm!” He glanced at David, reached for the newspaper on the table, became engrossed.

His mother lifted a bunch of carrots from a bag, dropped them into a dishpan and while she pared them, eyed David, fondly.

He was silent, met her gaze a moment and then vacantly tightened the table cloth against the table’s edge.

— Don’t believe Don’t believe. Don’t believe. Never!

XV

ON SUNDAY, David stayed in bed the whole morning, and then, dressed, spent the rest of the day in-doors. He had sneezed several times last night and again this morning, and what with his back aching — which David was sure ached for other reasons — his mother maintained that he might have caught a cold as a result of wandering through the streets. His father scoffed at the idea, but refrained from interfering. Although it meant having to be near his father all day, David was grateful not to have to face Yussie or Annie or the boy he pushed or anyone in fact. He clung to his mother or retreated to his bedroom, avoided the room his father was in, and in general, made himself as inconspicuous as possible. Toward evening, however, the dark forced him into the kitchen together with his father. Whereupon he fetched out his box of trinkets, found a corner least in the way, and sitting down on the linoleum floor, began constructing with the odds and ends that filled the box a zig-zag and precarious tower which his father’s or mother’s tread invariably sent toppling down.

During the late afternoon and even until supper-time, his father had several times confidently remarked that Luter would come to his senses, forego this folly of hunting for a wife and eventually appear at the table in time for the meal … However, though they waited almost an hour past the usual time, he never came. It was only when David’s mother began to complain mildly that half her cooking was over-done and the other half cold, that he gave up waiting, and shrugging his shoulders in brusque irritation, permitted her to serve the meal.

“In Tysmenicz,” he scowled sourly as he settled into a chair, “the peasant who tended my—” (There was always that hitch in his speech before the word) “my father’s cattle used to say that a man had to be born a fool to be one. My friend Luter should come on his second childhood early in years — God’s given him a new soul.” He pulled the plate toward him with abrupt impatience. “All I hope is he doesn’t blame my married happiness for his marriage!” He uttered the last words with a peculiar challenging emphasis.

David who was watching his mother as she stood above her husband serving him, saw her bosom swell up slowly as though responding to minute increments of pain, and then without response, exhale tautly her muted breath and look off blankly and resigned. David himself knew only one thing — that the relief Luter’s absence afforded him was as sharp and fervent as a prayer, and that every wordless nerve begged never to see the man again.

At bed-time, his mind seemed strangely calm, reposed without being resolved, inert after long discord. Beneath the film of apathy, the events of yesterday ruffled the surface only rarely, like the tardy infrequent wreckage of a ship long sunken. They would never be answered these questions of why his mother had let Luter do what Annie had tried to do; why she hadn’t run away the second time as she had the first; why she hadn’t told his father; or had she; or didn’t he care. Nor would there ever be the equilibrium again between his knowing what she had done and her unawareness that he knew; her unawareness of what he had done with Annie, of why he had run away; his father’s unawareness of every thing. They would never be solved, never be answered. No one would say anything, no one dared, no one could. Just don’t believe, don’t believe, never. But when would that queer weight, that odd something lodged in his bosom, that was so spiny, ramified, reminding, when would that vanish? Tomorrow, maybe? Maybe tomorrow.

Tomorrow came. Monday. The cold of the day before had either been imaginary or been thrown off. David was sent to school. Once out of the house, he walked guardedly, even taking a new route to avoid meeting Annie or Yussie. In the morning, he succeeded and again at noon, but when school was out for the day, they ran into him as he came out into the open of the crossing. David, himself, shrank away when they hailed him, but they on the other hand seemed to have forgotten all hostilities. Instead they were merely curious.

“W’od id ’ey do t’yuh in de polliss station?” Yussie engaged his arm to keep him in step with the slower limping Annie.

“Nutt’n’!” He shook him off sullenly. “Lemme go!”

“Hey, yuh mad?” Yussie looked surprised.

“Yea, I’m mad! I’ll never get glad!”

“He’s mad, Annie!”

“Nisht gefiddled!” she said spitefully. “Pooh! Who wants yuh!”

“Cry baby!” said Yussie disdainfully.

But David was already hurrying off.

At home, he could not help but observe in his mother’s actions a concealed nervousness, an irresolution as if under the strain of waiting. Unlike the fluent, methodical way in which she habitually moved about the kitchen, her manner now was disjointed, uncertain. In the midst of doing something or of saying something, she would suddenly utter a curious, suppressed exclamation like a sudden groan of dismay, or lift her hand in an obscure and hopeless gesture, or open her eyes as though staring at perplexity and brush back her hair. Everything she did seemed insecure and unfinished. She went from the sink to the window and left the water running and then remembering it was an odd overhastiness, turned, missed the handkerchief she was pegging to the clothesline and let it fall into the yard. A few minutes later, separating the yolks from the whites of the eggs to make the thick yellow pancakes that were to go with the soup, she cut the film of the yolk with eggshell, lost it in the whites. She stamped her foot, chirped with annoyance and brushed back her hair.

“I’m like my father,” she exclaimed suddenly. “Vexation makes my scalp itch! Today you can learn what kind of a woman not to marry.”

Several times during the afternoon, David had been on the point of asking her whether Luter were coming for supper. But something always checked him and he never formed the question.

To avoid the strange emotion, that his mother’s behavior aroused in him, he would have gone downstairs again, even at the risk of encountering Annie or Yussie, but there again, he divined how impatient she would be if he asked her to wait in the hallway. She had seemed cross when he called to her frantically after his meeting with them at three. As she offered no objections he remained indoors and occupied himself in a score of ways — now frightening himself by making faces at the pier glass, now staring out of the window, now fingering the haze of breath upon it, now crawling under beds, now scribbling. He spent an hour tying himself to the bed post with a bit of washline and attempting to escape, and another constructing strange devices with his trinkets. He tried to play the four-handed game of manipulating patterns out of a double string with two hands and the leg of a chair. It was difficult, the old patterns slipped before they were clinched, ended in a snarl. The mind too was tangled, apprehensive, pent-up.

Meanwhile he had observed that his mother’s nervousness was increasing. She seemed neither able to divert her mind nor complete any task other than was absolutely necessary. She had begun to sew the new linen she had bought to make pillow-cases with and had ended by ripping out the thread and throwing the cloth back into the drawer with a harassed cry. “God knows why I can’t make these stitches any shorter! Six to a yard almost! They’d have parted with a shroud’s wear!” And then later, gave up the attempt to thread a cupful of large red beads and dropped them into the cup again and shut her eyes. The newspaper received only a worried glance and was folded up again and dropped in her lap. After which, she sat for such a long time staring at him, that David’s uneasiness grew intolerable. His eyes fluttered hurriedly about the room, searching for something that might distract the fixity of that stare. And grazing the coal sack beside the stove, the seams of the ceiling, the passover dishes on top of the china closet, sink legs, garbage pail, doorhinges, chandelier, lighted on the mantle burning with its soft, bluish flame.

“Mama!” He made no attempt to conceal the anxiety in his voice.

Her lids flickered. She who was always near him in spirit, now seemed hardly aware. “What?”

“Why does that light — that light in the mantle stay inside? In the mantle?”

She looked up, combed her upper lip with her teeth a moment. “That’s because there are great brains in the world.”

“But it breaks all up,” he urged her attention closer. “All up if you — if you even just blow.”

“Yes.”

“It doesn’t burn even when you light it?”

“No.” The dull remote tone never left her voice — as if speech were mechanical, forced.

“Why?” He demanded desperately. “Why doesn’t it?”

“Doesn’t what? I don’t know.” She rose, shivered suddenly. “As though it pierced the marrow! Is it cold in here? Or where I sit? Chill?” And stared at the stove, then followed her gaze after a long pause as if her very thought were delayed, and picked up the poker.

“I don’t feel cold.” David reminded her sullenly.

But she hadn’t heard him. Instead her eyes had swerved from his face to the wall and she stood as if listening beyond him, as if she had heard a sound in the hallway outside. No one. She shook her head. And still with the poker in one hand, lifted the other to adjust the gas-cock under the mantle-light—

“Ach!” Exasperatedly she flung her hand down to her side. “Where are my senses? What am I doing?” She crouched down before the stove, buried the poker into the ashes with a provoked stab. “Have you ever seen your mother so mixed? So lost? God have mercy, my wits are milling! Ach! I go here and I’m there! I go there and I’m here. And of a sudden I’m nowhere.” She lifted the stove lid, threw a shovelful of coal into the red pit. “David darling, you were saying—?” Her voice had become solicitous, penitent. She smiled. “You were saying what? Light? Why what?”

Heartened by her new interest, he began again eagerly. “What makes it burn?”

“The gas? Gas of course.”

“Why?”

“One lights it — with a match. And then — Er. And then—” As abruptly as her mood had changed a moment ago, it reverted again. That odd look of strain spindled the corners of her eyes, her face resumed that hunted, alert look. “And then one turns — the — the—”. She broke off. “Only a moment, darling! I’m going into the front room.”

That was the end! He wasn’t going to talk to her any more! He wasn’t going to ask her anything. No, even if she talked to him, he wouldn’t answer. Sullenly, he slumped down into his chair and sullenly watched her hurry up the steps into darkness … heard the window slide open, softly, cautiously … and then close again … She came down.

“Not even the cold air can rouse me.” Her fingers drummed nervously on the ridge of a chair. “Nothing does any good. My head is — Oh, I’m sorry, David, beloved! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to run off in the middle of answering you.” She came over, bent down and kissed him. “Do you forgive me?”

Unappeased, he regarded her in steady silence.

“Offended? I shan’t do it again! I promise!” Where the broad waxen plane of her cheeks curved into the chin, small dents of contrition appeared — the very furthest away a smile could get from the distracted brown eyes, the creased brow. She shook herself. “Er … Burns, you said. Burns! Everything burns! Yes! Or almost. Kerosene, coal, wood, candles, paper, almost everything. And so gas — at least I think so. Er … And so gas, you see? They keep it in great vats, you know. Some tall — like the ash-cans out in the street, some short, like drums, only bigger. I don’t understand them.”

“But mama!” He wasn’t going to permit her to pause; she would fade back into her old mood if he did. “Mama! Water doesn’t burn when you throw a match in a puddle.”

“Puttle?” she repeated. “What is puttle? Your Yiddish is more than one-half English now. I’m being left behind.”

“Puddle. It’s water — in the street — when it rains sometimes.”

“Oh! Water. No, tears sometimes — No! You’re right. Water doesn’t burn.”

“Is there always a — something burning — when it’s light — like that!”

“Yes I think so. When I was a girl, the goyim built an ‘altar’ near a town some distance from Veljish because two peasants saw a light among the trees — yet nothing burning.”

“What’s a — what you said? Altar?” It was his turn to be puzzled. “Means old man?”

“No!” She laughed shortly. “An altar is a broad stone — about so high.” Her downturned palms impatiently leveled the air at bosom’s height. “They have a flat top. So. And because the ground was holy, they fenced it in.”

“Because why? They saw a light and — and nothing burned? So that was holy?”

“Yes. So it pleased them to say. I suppose that was because Moses too saw a tree on fire that didn’t burn. And there the gound was also holy.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. And when you begin going to cheder you’ll know more about these things than I do.” She stopped pacing, moved abruptly toward the china-closet. “I think I’ll set the table — do something.”

“Was it holy?” He drew her on.

“What? The light the peasants saw? Ach, nonsense! My father said that the truth was an old Jewess had been walking along the road through the woods. Where she was coming from I don’t know—”

She paused again. Three plates had been taken from the china closet and set on the table. The fourth, still in her hand, kept fluttering back and forth as though it were impossible for her to decide whether to set it on the table or to replace it on the stack she had taken it from. Finally, with a throaty exclamation, she set it on the table — before the chair on which Luter usually sat.

“Yes! So! Oh!” Her head went back as if returning thought were an impact. “Yes. Coming home, she was. Without doubt. And on the way, dusk overtook her. Yes. It was Friday. Now it chanced that she had candles with her — or so my father said, though he never said why. Perhaps she foresaw that she would be delayed. There’s no telling what women will do when they’re pious.” Her lips pressed together and she reddened ever so faintly setting the clinking silverware beside Luter’s plate. “She foresaw. Let us say, she foresaw. And with night coming on, she stopped beside the road and lit the candles and prayed over them as you’ve seen me pray. And having prayed, went on, leaving them lit — a Jew may not tamper with the candles once they’re burning and the prayer said. Then these peasants came along at night. And devout as she or more perhaps—” With a slight, spattering sound from the end of her lip, one cheek eddied in; she set the cup and saucer above Luter’s plate. “And perhaps drunk or surely dull-witted, saw the light in the woods — so my father said — and ran back and roused the village. They saw it and saw it vanish, and approaching, found nothing, heard nothing, only the sound of the woods. What more could they want? Priests came and high priests and consecrated the place.” Her eyes, momentarily meditative, kindled again, whisked to the door. She was listening again.

“Didn’t the candles leave another candle?” David strove to force her attention back again. “Like our candles? It’s water and candles.”

She shrugged impatiently. “Who bothered to look? The ground was holy; people soon remembered having seen angels; and there’s an end. And why hunt for candle-drippings. The altar did the village a mass of good.”

“How?”

“People, benighted ones, they came from all over Austria. They brought their sick, their maimed. They asked aid, they prayed for the dead and for better fortune. And they still do. And—” She paused, almost losing the thread, but regained it with a jolt. “While they were there, they had to eat, they had to buy things, they had to sleep somewhere. Fear not, those little candles kindled the day for the storekeepers in Lagronow. You see?”

“Yes, mama.”

“So much did they benefit Lagronow that Jews, merchants, in other villages also left a burning candle here or there. It never succeeded again.”

“But that wasn’t a real one,” he reminded her. “That wasn’t a real light. And — and without burning. But Moses, he—”

“Sh!” Sudden and sharp her warning.

David listened: The quick creak of the outer doorway. The slow and heavy footfall, carpet-muffled. That was his father’s way, a thrust of impatience followed by deliberation.

His mother, looking very pale, had opened the door a crack and stood there with one ear pressed against it. No sound of voices drifted up, no interweaving of a second footfall. She drew back, staring, shut the door carefully, sighed, but whether out of relief or apprehension, there was no telling, then stood attentive, waiting for him to enter.

In a few seconds, he did, and David knew by the very way the door swung open that his father was irritated. He came in — alone. The muscles under the dark jaws were bumpy, distinct, like cords twisted about and bulging. His eyes held a steady glower.

“Albert.” She smiled.

He made no answer, but breathing gustily, stripped off his coat — the jacket beneath always peeled with it — and removed his hat and handed them to her.

“I hope you haven’t prepared too much supper,” he began brusquely as he whipped his tie and collar off. “He wouldn’t come. Do you hear?” She had gone into David’s bedroom to hang up his coat.

“Yes.” Her voice preceded her. “I can use what’s left over. There’s no loss — especially in the winter — nothing spoils.”

“Hm!” He turned his back to her, rolled up his sleeves and bent over the sink. “And don’t prepare anything extra for him to-morrow. He’s not coming then either.” The squeezed soap slipped clacking into the sink. His teeth ground as he picked it up.

“No?” Her eyes, resting on his bent back opened in a worried flicker; her face sagged. But the next moment her voice was as barely surprised as a voice dared be and yet be non-committal. “What’s the matter?”

“Would I had known as little of him as I know his reasons!” He slapped his dripping palms angrily against his lean neck. “He wouldn’t say anything! He wouldn’t even ride home with me — had to go somewhere — some lame excuse! And that marriage-broker affair! Not a word! As though it had never been! As though he had never spoken about it! He took the keys from me in the morning, checked my overtime, and that was all!” He shut the water off with a wrathful jerk, snatched the towel. “God knows what he’s found or done or achieved! It’s too much for me! But why, tell me?” The towel paused in its swirling. “Do you think that if he found a woman who thought he was agreeable and had — she, I mean — a great deal of money, do you think that that might have given him a wry neck?”

A faint, troubled groan ushered in her answer. “I don’t know, Albert.”

“Now be honest!” He suddenly swung the towel into a ball, glared and thrust his lips out. “Answer me with a brunt!”

“What is it, Albert?” She lifted startled, fending hands. “What is it?”

Seeing her alarm, David squirmed back into his chair and watched them apprehensively under the rims of lowered eyes.

“I—” his father broke off, bit his lip. “Was anything said by — by me? Did I seem to be mocking him — when was it? — Friday night? When I told you he was going to a marriage broker?”

“Why, no, Albert!” Her body seemed to slacken. “No! Not at all! You said nothing that would offend any one! I thought he was amused!”

“You’re sure? You’re sure he didn’t leave so early because I — because of some jest I made?”

“No. You said nothing out of the way.”

“Unh! I thought I hadn’t! Well, what fiend is it that eggs him on then? He was like a man with a secret grudge. He wouldn’t speak! He wouldn’t look at me straight. A man I’ve known for months! A man who’s been here night after night!” He pulled a chair toward him, slumped into it. “At noon today, he ate his lunch with that Paul Zeeman. He knows I hate the man. He did that to hurt me. I know!”

“But — don’t — don’t let that upset you, Albert. I mean, don’t take offense at that! It’s — why—” She laughed nervously—“It’s too much like a school-girl’s device — this — this eating with another.”

“Is it?” he asked sarcastically. “Much you know about it! You haven’t seen him all day. It wasn’t only that! There were other things! I tell you there’s something seething in that skull of his! A hatred, for some mad reason! A vengeance biding its time! Do you know?” He suddenly drew back, looked up at her with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “You don’t seem dismayed — you don’t seem downcast enough!”

“Why, Albert!” She flinched before his harsh scrutiny. “I am dismayed! I am downcast. But what can I do? My only hope is that this — this hostility — or what one may call it — is — is only temporary! What can it be? For a time perhaps! Something worrying him that he won’t disclose! Why, it may be all over by to-morrow!”

“Yes. It may indeed! Something may! But my belief is that no man would become a stranger to me overnight unless he thought I had wronged him. Isn’t that so? And he — he’s worse than a stranger — he’s a foe! Avoiding me as if the sight of my face were a stab! Looking past me darkly! Ha! It’s more than something transient! It’s — what’s the matter?”

She was pale. With the glass pitcher in one hand, she strained vainly with the other to open the tap of the faucet. “I can’t open it, Albert! You must have shut it too tightly when you washed. I want some water for the table.”

“Are you weak suddenly?” He rose, strode sourly to the sink, twisted the tap open. “And as for him—” he stared ominously at the gushing water—“if he doesn’t change, he’d better be careful! He’ll find that I can change even more!”

There was a pause, a gathering of strain. Silently his mother set the pitcher on the table, went to the stove and began ladling out the steaming yellow pea-soup into the bowls. Stray drops that fell from the brown pancakes as she transferred them from the pot to the dishes hissed over the stove lids. The odor was savory. But David, glancing hurriedly at his father’s gloomy face, resolved to eat more carefully than he had ever eaten in his life. So far these sombre eyes had scarcely rested on him; now he felt himself trying to contract within himself to vanish from their ken. And failing, concentrated on the frosted moisture of the glass pitcher and how each drop awaited ripeness before it slid.

His father reached for the bread — it seemed to ease the strain. Relieved, David glanced up. His mother came near, her face strangely sorrowful and brooding, incongruous somehow, dissociated completely from her task of carrying a platter of soup. She set it down before his father, and straightening, touched his shoulder timidly.

“Albert!”

“Hm?” He stopped chewing, twirled the spoon he had just picked up.

“Perhaps I should ask you this after supper when your mind is easier, but—”

“What?”

“You — you won’t do anything rash? Please! I beg you!”

“I’ll know what to do when the hour falls,” he answered darkly. “Don’t let that trouble you.”

In spite of himself, David started. Against a sudden screen of darkness he had seen a dark roof, a hammer brandished over pale and staring cobbles.

“Pouh!” his father snorted, lowering his spoon. “Salt? Don’t you use that any more?”

“Not salted? I’m sorry Albert! Everything I’ve done today has gone awry — even the soup!” She laughed desperately. “I’m a good cook!”

“What should trouble you so much?” His sharp gaze rested on David. “Has he been lost again or up to some new madness?”

“No! No! Not him—! Begin eating, child! Not him! I don’t know! Nothing I did today had my eyes and my wits in the doing. Every hour brought some fresh confusion. It was one of those fateful days that make people superstitious. There’s a handkerchief in the yard this very moment. Who knows what made me drop it!”

His father shrugged. “At least you were alone. There was no one watching you! No one prodding you with his eyes into blunders.”

“You mean — him again?”

“Yes! Him! Twice I didn’t feed the sheet into the press just so. They wrinkled, crushed! The underpad was inked! I was ten minutes each time cleaning them! I tell you he gloated! I saw him!” He stopped eating, hammered the spoon on the table. “There’s evil brewing inside him! He’s waiting, waiting for something! I could feel his eyes on my back all day, but never there when I turned to face him! It took my mind off my work! I fed the press as though I were lame! I couldn’t have done worse the first day I began! Now too soon! Now too late! Now just missing! And then the mussed paper caught in the roller — in the gummy ink. I had to take the whole thing apart! And every minute the feeling that he was watching me. Ha!” He breathed harshly. His lips writhed back and his words battered against the barred teeth. “It’s more than I can bear! It’s more than I’ll stand! If he’s waiting for something, he’ll get it!”

“Albert!” She had stopped eating as well and was gazing at him panic stricken. “Don’t—!” Her unsteady fingers closed her lips.

“I tell you he’ll hear from me! I’m no lamb!”

“If — if it’s that bad, Albert. If it doesn’t change, and he’s — he’s that way — why don’t you l-leave! There are other places!”

“Leave?” He repeated ominously. “Leave! So. But the first man I’ve ever trusted in this cursed land to treat me like a foe. The worst of all! Leave!” He stared at his plate bitterly, shook his head. “You’re a strange one yourself. You’ve trembled every time I had a new job — trembled for me to keep it. I could read it in your face — you pressed me to be patient. And now you urge me to leave. Well, we’ll see! We’ll see! But when I leave he’ll know it, never fear! And do me a favor. Take those plates away.” He nodded toward Luter’s place. “It’s as though someone were dead.”

XVI

TUESDAY afternoon, his mother’s drawn, distracted face was too much for him to bear. Without asking her to wait in the hallway, he had fled into the street, and without calling to her, had come up again, alone. Neither Annie, who never hobbled past without sticking out her awl-like tongue, nor Yussie’s reiterated, “Cry-baby,” nor the cellar-door at the end of the vacant hallway were half as painful to endure as the stiff anguish in his mother’s face or the numb silence of the hours of waiting for his father. Again and again, he could almost have wished that by some miracle Luter would return, would be there beside his father when the door was opened. But his mother set only three places around the table. There would be no miracle then. She knew. Luter would never return!

And when his father came home, he came in alone again. The sight of him this evening was terrifying. Never, not even the night he had beaten David, did he radiate, so fell, so electric a fury. It was as though his whole body were smouldering, a stark, throbbing, curdling emanation flowed from him, a dark, corrosive haze that was all the more fearful because David sensed how thin an aura it was of the terrific volcano clamped within. He refused to speak. He scarcely touched his food. His eyelids, normally narrow, seemed to have stretched beyond human roundness, revealing the whole globe of the eye in which the black pupils almost engulfed the brown. He looked at no one. His mad, burnished gaze roved constantly above their heads along the walls as if he were tracing and retracing the line of the moulding beneath the ceiling. Between the hollow of mouth and chin, his twitching lips threw a continual flicker of shadow. There was a place above the stiff sickle nostrils that looked dented — so pinched and white they were. Only once did he break his silence and then only for a brief time in a voice as harsh and labored as a croak.

“Flour? Why? Two sacks of flour? Two? Under the shelf? Under the Passover dishes?”

She stared at him mutely, too bewildered, too panic-stricken to answer.

“Hanh? Are they going to wall you in? Or is the long lean year crouching?”

Her whole body before she answered quivered forward as though shaking off layers and layers of some muffling, suffocating fabric.

“Flour!” Her voice under the strain was high-pitched and hysteric. “A sale at the grocer’s. Nev-Neven’s Street! There in that market!” She trembled again, swallowed, striving desperately to calm herself. “I thought since we used so much, it would be wise to — oh!” She sprang to her feet in horror. “You mean why did I leave them under the Passover dishes! I’ll take them away! This moment!”

“No! No! Leave them! Leave them! Leave them!” (David thought the fierce crescendo of his voice would never end) “Sit down. The mice won’t get them!”

She sat down stunned. “I’ll get them later,” she said dully. “I shouldn’t have left them there. I can no longer think.” And taking a deep breath. “One is tempted to buy more than one needs these days, things are so cheap. Is there anything you’d like me to get you? Smoked salmon? Sour cream, thick almost as butter. They say they mix flour into it! Black olives?”

“My head is splitting.” His eyes were roving along the walls again. “Don’t say more than you can help.”

“Can’t I do something for you? A cold compress?”

“No.”

She shut her eyes, rocked slightly and said no more.

David would have whimpered, but dared not. The intolerable minutes unreeled from an endless spool of nightmare.…

By Wednesday afternoon, another and even more disturbing change had come over his mother. Yesterday afternoon and the day before, she had been impatient with him, unresponsive to his questions, distracted, disjointed in her answers. Now she listened to him with a fixity that made him increasingly uneasy. Wherever he walked about the kitchen, wherever he stood or sat, her eyes followed him, and there was something so fervent, so focused in her gaze that he found his own eyes not daring to meet hers. She did not chide him to-day for dawdling over his after-school bread and butter, or postponing the moment of having to go down. On the contrary, everything was reversed. This afternoon it was he who ate rapidly in order to be ready to go down sooner, and it was his mother who sought to delay him. “And what else?” She would ask. The moment he had completed narrating some incident in school. “And what else happened? What did you see then?” And always her tone had the same rapt, insistent note, and she hung on his every word with such a feverish hungered gaze that several times a curious shudder ran through him, a chill, as if the floor for a second had opened beneath him and he were plunging down a void.

“But on your way home,” she urged. “You haven’t told me. Was there nothing new?”

“No-o.” He hesitated, his eyes wandering about the kitchen avoiding that over-bright, clinging gaze. When would she be satisfied, he wondered, when would she let him go? Uneasily he rummaged among his memories, found the only thing he knew he hadn’t told her yet. “There was a man yesterday.” He began. “On the street that’s the other side of school.” He paused, hoping against hope her interest had flagged.

“Yes! Yes!” Her voice was like a prod. “Yes!”

“And the man, he was making a sidewalk. Like that.” He palmed the green sheet of oil cloth on the table. “With an iron with a handle. A new sidewalk.”

“They’re building up Brownsville!” She smiled at him with frightening intentness. “And? You unwilling, silent, beloved one! And?”

“And when the man wasn’t looking … and the sidewalk was green — it’s green when it’s new.”

“I have seen that also.”

“And a boy came and the man wasn’t looking — he was pushing the iron here. And the boy stepped on it — like that.” He slipped down from the chair, toed the linoleum, “And made a hole with his shoe. Like that—”

Her face had sagged strangely, lips parting before a slow emission of breath. The taut, pale planes of her cheeks seemed to have slipped the chin-bone, overlapped it. Under the raised brows the intent brown eyes were focused on a distance so vast it returned upon her. In dismay, David stopped speaking and blinking with dismay watched her.

“I heard you! I heard you!” She shook her head breathlessly. “Yes! Yes! I heard you!” Through long corridors of brooding her gaze skimmed toward him again. “Yes!”

“Why did you look th-that way?” He wavered between alarm and curiosity.

“Nothing! Nothing at all! I did that too when I was a girl, stepping on a road, new-made. But mine was black! Nothing! Nothing at all! And then what? What did the man do!”

“The man,” he continued uneasily, “the man didn’t see. And yesterday he did it … When I went to school after lunch yesterday. And now there aren’t any more boards on it. And it’s hard like other sidewalks. Nearly white they powder it. And — and you can jump on it. Like that. And you can’t do anything. But he made that hole. And there’s a hole now. You can even see that little red iron on his shoe — in front. It made a hole too! And there’s a piece of cigarette in it already.”

“Naturally!”

“Why does it get so you can’t make a hole any more — even with an umbrella. A broken one I saw. Only sparks when you hit it.” He ducked under the hungering, round eyes. “You talk now.”

“No, you!”

“Aaaaa!”

“Won’t you?” she coaxed.

“I’m all finished now — with my bread,” he reminded her crossly.

“Do you want some more? Some milk?” The eager intensity with which her words followed one another seemed to squeeze letters out of syllables.

He shook his head, eyed her obliquely.

“You can stay with me for a while, beloved.” She opened her arms for him to come to her. “You don’t have to go down.”

He drooped, pouted, but finally trudged over to her and settled on her knee. All this time he had wanted very much to go down, to escape, but he had again caught a sound of pleading in her voice, an expectancy.

“I–I’ll stay here.”

“Oh, you do want to go down!” She unlocked her arms. “Yes you do! I’ve been keeping you. Come! I’ll get your coat!”

“No! No! I don’t! No, mama! I just — I just wanted to look out of the window. That’s what I wanted.”

“Is that all? Are you sure?”

“Yes. Only open. It has to be open.” Some condition was necessary to justify his hesitance. “Will you open it?”

“Of course!” She suddenly pressed him to her fervently, rocked him against her breast. “What would I do without my son in bitter hours? My son! But, darling, the window with the fire-escape before it. Not the other. Good? Sweet fragment! I’ll get a pillow for you to lean on. Do you want to go now?”

“Yes.” He squirmed free.

“First your sweater then. It’s cold out.”

She fetched it. And when he had pulled it on, both went up to the front-room where she opened the window before the little fire-escape, pulled the heavy white curtains aside, cleared the sill of pots and milk bottles and placed a pillow on it.

“And this you’ll want to kneel on.” She drew a chair up. “It can’t damage it any and you can look out much better. Your mittens?”

“No. I’m not cold.”

She leaned over his shoulder, sniffed the air. “It drills the nostrils. Do you see how blue it’s gotten over there, over those brown houses. How early! In the summer this would be late and Albert soon—” She stopped. The fingers on his shoulders twitched. “Ach! I threw a stone upon my own heart then!” With a slack and suddenly aimless hand she fondled his ears and the nape of his neck. “One cannot hide himself long from his fear.” She groaned softly and began drumming on the window pane just as she had drummed on the table yesterday and the day before. “Will you knit another dream for me if I come up later? No?” She patted his head and walked slowly from the front room.

Moodily, he leaned further out to stare down the street.

On the right there were children near the stores at the end of the block, girls skipping rope. Annie was turning. He could see the brace. When he squinted tightly he thought he could make out Yussie standing beside the boy on a tricycle, but wasn’t quite sure if that really was Yussie. Then he could have gone down and stayed near the house without being molested. It would have been better than just being half in the street and half out. He wondered why it was that one could be half in the street and half out and yet never be able to picture the street and the inside of the house together. He could picture the street and the yellow wall of his house, but not the inside. Once he had seen men tearing down the wall of an old wooden house. You could see the inside from the street — the wall paper and the chandelier, the black thickness between floors, windows, open doors. It was strange. Everything looked shrunken. Everything looked frightened.

There was a shout down the street. The boy on the tricycle had begun pedaling followed by the other who alternately propelled or jumped on the axle between the rear wheels. It was Yussie. They swerved, jounced off the curb onto the gutter, circled careening, zigzagged tipsily and bucked the curb again. With a feeling of jealousy he strained his ears to catch what Yussie was shouting between shrieks of laughter. He wouldn’t give Yussie a ride if he had a wheel. Never. He wouldn’t even stay in this block. No, he’d go far away. Where, far? He’d get lost again. The thought sent a shiver through him. Not this time though. His mother would write the address down for him and he’d carry it with him always, in his pocket. They wouldn’t fool him again. He’d ride away. Maybe after those telegraph poles, if you went way, way on, there was a place like a picture in the candy store. That lady who stood on a big box of cigarettes and wore a handkerchief under her eyes and funny fat pants without a dress and carried a round sword. A place where those houses were that she lived in, that all ended in sharp points. He had seen a man in a hat once like that, with a sharp point. He had a mustache and was in the Jewish paper his mother bought. The Tageblatt! When he went that night and — No! Lost the money — No! No! And — and! No!.. Houses, he was saying. Points. Points they had, yes, not corners on top like those across the street. Yellow and old wood corner. Brown and green corner. And the grey one with the little window in it that looked like the roof was going to be a star — went down and then didn’t go so down. Why?

He couldn’t answer it, and stared again at the two on the tricycle. Yussie had gotten off, and the owner, his feet removed from the whirling pedals was letting the other push him as fast as he could. The peaks of their caps were turned backwards. Tooting breathlessly they bounced swiftly over the pitted gutter toward David’s house. They were racing. He could tell by their caps. And as they drew near, the driver’s shrill, spurring, “We’re beatin’! We’re beatin’! Horry op!” sent the blood tingling through his own veins. They were almost in front of the house now. In another moment, they would pass beneath his window — when suddenly with a sharp scrape of sliding shoes, Yussie braked the flying wheels to a stop and gaped over the other’s shoulder. Wonderingly, David turned his head to the left to follow his gaze.

Only a few yards off, a tall, lean stranger approached, stooping slightly and bearing close to his dark coat, a white parcel, high, as though he meant to proffer it to the two boys before him. An instant David stared, and suddenly in the space of one stride, it was neither stranger nor parcel he saw, but his own father, and the right hand against his coat was hanging from a sling and swathed in bandages. He screamed.

“Papa! Papa!”

The slow head lifted, grim jaws, beaked nose and steady-glaring eyeballs. The two boys astride and beside the wheel sidled out of his way. David flung himself back from the window, fled screaming into the kitchen. His mother was already on the stair, frightened—

“David! What is it!”

“Papa’s coming! His hand! His hand! It’s all in”—He circled his own. “All in white! He’s coming!”

“Dear God! Hurt! He’s hurt?” She shook him. The starting brown eyes seemed to waken the pallor of her skin, the clutching hand among her hair its bronze. “Albert!” She flew to the door. “Albert!” Her voice in the hallway was hoarse. “Albert! Albert!”

To David, crouched back against the frontroom stairs, his father’s harsh, suppressed words snapped through the open doorway.

“Hush! Hush, I say! An end to your wailing! Get back!”

“Blood! Blood!”

Moaning, clawing at her cheek, his mother came in — backwards held at arm’s-thrust by his father. His face was grey, so grey the bluish stubble on his hard and bulging jaws stood out in separate dots. On the thick white bandage around his hand, a red spot glowered where the thumb should be.

“Yes! Blood!” He rapped out, slamming the door. “Have you never seen it? First that idiot barks from the window at my approach! Now you! Lament! Lament! Bring all your neighbors in here cackling!”

“Oh, Albert! Albert!” She swayed back and forth. “What is it? What’s happened?” The tears braided on her cheek-bones.

“You always were a fool!” he growled. “You see me alive! Will you stop it!”

“Tell me! Tell me!” Her voice dwindled with anguish. “Tell me—! What have you — done? I — alas! before I—”

“Done? Me?”

“What! Tell me!” She was breathing thickly “Hurry!”

“You’re not far from wrong!” he snarled. “You’ve almost guessed it! Yes! I would have done, but that cursed press ground me first! Anh! That press saved him! He doesn’t know it! I would have — What!”

With a whispered groan her head sank. She stumbled toward a chair, dropped into it, slumped, her limp arms hanging beside her. At the sight of her awful pallor David burst into tears.

“Bah!” his father scoffed angrily. “In God’s name I thought you had more wisdom.” He strode to the sink, filled up a glass of water, pried it between her lips. The water runneled her chin, spattered on her dress. “And you’re the one to faint!” he snorted bitterly.

“I’m all right!” she said weakly, lifting her head. “I’m all right, Albert. But — but you didn’t strike him!”

“No!” savagely. “I told you I didn’t! He escaped. Are you more worried about him than about me? Is that it?”

“No! No!”

“Then what are you fainting for? It’s only my thumb. The jaws of the press! I wasn’t quick enough! It jammed, that’s all. You didn’t take on this way when I caught the nail of that finger, did you?”

She hissed, wincing.

“I’ve still got it with me — my thumb — if that’s what’s troubling you. If you hadn’t deafened me with your clamor I could have told you sooner! Now help me off with my coat — or are you still too weak?”

She rose unsteadily, took hold of his coat-collar.

“Curse him!” he muttered squirming free slowly. “The treacherous dog! God’s flame make a candle of him! You don’t have any more privileges than any one else! That’s what he said to me before this — Unh!” He groaned between his teeth as the sleeve slid over his injured hand. “I shouldn’t have let — the jacket — go with it.”

“Is it so bad, Albert!” She put out her hand. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Stop coming at me that way, will you! I don’t need support!”

He stared at the bandage which now that his coat was off seemed to David’s tear-blurred eyes to have swollen to twice its bulk.

“He didn’t have to cover the fingers too, the fool!” He dropped into a chair, masked his eyes with his bony hand. It was heavily ink-blacked, unwashed. “Doctors! They’d rather use the whole ribbon than bother cutting it. And why not? They won’t have to carry it around.” His head dropped back.

“Can I give you anything? Coffee? We still have some wine left.”

“No,” wearily. “I’ll be drowsy soon without wine. I’ll sleep well.” He hooked the heel of his dull black shoe on the lowest rung of the chair, grunted as he stooped down.

“Let me!” She started forward.

He waved her back. “One hand is enough!” And pulling the buttons open. “The angel of Fate strikes always on the side you never guard. I thought that before that dog saw the last of me, I’d make him writhe. And I would have!” His teeth grated. “There was enough venom in me to finish a score of Luters. But they led me out like a sheep.” He kicked his shoe off, watched it roll over on its side, dully. “But you can’t think too much when you’re feeding a press. You can’t dwell too much on the one you hate. That’s the foreman’s privilege. His hands are free!” He shook his foot loose from the other shoe. “Anh! But he was pale when they led me into the bosses’ office. He must have seen what was in my eyes. He must have known who was to blame. And I had one good hand left. Or maybe it was the blood he couldn’t bear. I left it on their carpets.”

She had been watching him rigidly. And when he stopped speaking a tremor ran through her. “Did — did the doctor say anything? Will it heal soon?”

He shrugged. “It won’t have anything else to do. I can’t use it for weeks — at least, that’s what he said. It’s well munched.”

She groaned.

“They spoke of paying me something for the time I was out. Of their own free will they offered it. I don’t know why. But much they’ll give me. Tomorrow I see them again and the doct — tomorrow!” He caught his breath loudly. “Tomorrow is Thursday!”

His lips swelled out in hatred, his eyes burned savagely. Both David and his mother stared at him in fascinated terror.

“Curse him and his gifts!” he suddenly snarled. “May he burn with them! God bray him into bits!”

His right elbow moved downward, but the sling checked his hand. With writhing lips, he reached his left hand behind his back, fumbled in the right rear pocket and drew out his black leather pocket-book.

“Curse him!”

He drew out a small slip of white paper, the theatre-pass, crumpled it in grinding fingers to a crackling wad and threw it down on the table.

“Nothing fulfills itself with me! It’s all doomed! But what made him give me this? And what made him change? If I only knew! If I only knew!” His left hand drummed on the table.

There was a horrible silence while they stared at the wad of paper on the table. Then his father slipped the bandaged hand free from the sling and began slowly stretching it back and forth to flex the cramped and clicking elbow. His face wore an expression of grim aloofness as though it were not his own hand he was experimenting with but someone else’s. On his mother’s features horror and pity were written. David gazed from one to the other and finally like theirs his eyes came to rest on the hand that had just settled softly on the table, glimmering and peninsular on the green oilcloth. Minutes seemed to pass in a dull dragging vacancy in which no word was spoken. David looked up. His mother’s face was unchanged as though that anguished look were caught in stone. But his father’s face had become flushed, relaxed; the deep breath hissed softly at his nostrils. His eyelids had begun to linger at their shutting, opening not in one but in two stages. He spoke. Faint ratchets of effort against drowsiness and fatigue ticked and caught in his voice, thickening it. And as though to himself—

“I’ll never go back to work there again. I’ll never go back to printing at all. I’m through. Whatever work I do hereafter, it’s going to be out doors — alone if I can. But out doors always … I’ll not let myself be hemmed in by ink and iron any more. I don’t want any foremen for my friends. I don’t want anybody. I–I have no fortune with men.”

He sighed harshly, rose and yawned as if he were groaning. The bandaged hand stretched ceilingward, and when he brought it down into the sling again, one eye shut in pain—

“It’s as though it were hollow.” He turned toward the front room, eyed David a moment and went up.

“I’ll get you a quilt,” she trailed him.

He made no answer and both climbed up the front room stairs.

Sitting in numb silence beside the window, David stared after them, watched them disappear, listened. The bed creaked. In a few moments, he heard his mother’s quick tread and then the slither of something dragged from the couch — the quilt. And then the bedroom was closed and he heard only the ticking of the clock. The strange start of dread he had felt when his father’s eyes had rested on him still lingered with him. He had seen it before — that look, that flicker of veiled suspicion more frightening than wrath — had seen it almost always the day his father had thrown up a job. Why? What had he done? He didn’t know. He didn’t even want to know. It frightened him too much. Everything he knew frightened him. Why did he have to be here when his father came home? Why had his mother kept him? Why did he have to know? You had to know everything and suddenly what you knew became something else. You forgot why, but it was something else just the same. Scaring you—

There was a noise in the hallway — the door below. Hurrying feet mounted the stairs, climbed; but as they passed his floor, stopped, descended, approached his door uncertainly. He slid from his chair, listened, opened the door a crack. It was Yussie. His cap, still turned backward, gave his red face an even pudgier look.

“Hey, Davy!” he whispered hesitantly, spying through the partly open door.

“Waddayuh wan’?” Somehow he felt less grieved at Yussie now, even relieved at seeing him. It suddenly occurred to him that it was not Yussie but his sister he disliked so much. Still he wasn’t going to appear too friendly. “Wadjuh comm hea fuh?” he inquired morosely.

“Yuh mad on me yed, Davy?” He looked at him with innocent resignation.

“I don’ know,” he muttered tentatively. “Yea.”

“So I’ll take beck de cry-baby,” he offered placatingly. “I’ll never call yuh again, I shuh live so! It wuz all Ennie’s fault — she made me.”

“You don’ like her?” suspiciously.

“No! I’m mad on her! She’s a lousy mut!”

“So comm in.”

Yussie sidled in eagerly, looked around. “Aw!” His lips fell in disappointment. “He ain’ hea! Did he go ’way awreddy?”

“My fodder yuh wan’?” He suddenly saw through Yussie’s ruse. “So dat’s w’y yuh comm hea? Don’ make no noise! He’s sleepin’.”

“Oh!” And then inquisitively. “Wadda big bendige he had on. I seen it. So wad’d he get id fuh?”

“He god hoided in a printin’ press. Dot’s w’y. His fingeh. So dey put id on.”

“Yeh? I t’ought maybe — I know sommbody wod he hoided his hand on de Futt f’om Jillai — wid a fiyuh crecker. He had id in his house so he lighded id. Den he wanned t’ t’row id oud f om de windeh. So de windeh woz cluz. So he didn’ know w’ea he sh’t’row id. So bang—!”

“Sh!”

They turned. She had tip-toed so quietly from his father’s bedroom that neither of them had heard her. While they watched her silently, she shut the front room door, came down the steps with a slow uncertainty.

“Don’t be offended with me, Yussele.” In the blank immobility of her face, a bare mechanical smile stirred her lips. “Go on. Speak further if you like.”

“Yea.” Impatiently Yussie summarized his narrative, nor bothered to switch tongue. “I wuz tellin’ him about a fiyuh crecker wod a boy wuz holdin’ an’ id wen’ bang! So aftuh id w’en bang, id hoided him de hand so he had t’ pud a bendige on like Misteh Schoil.”

The name seemed to waken her momentarily. She shook her head wearily.

“An’ aftuh, so his ear woz makin’ Kling! Kling! Kling! Jos’ like dat! Kling! Kling! Kling! Cauze de fiyuh crecker wen’ bang by his ears! Den he wannid me I sh’ hea’ by him de ears, bod I couldn’ hea’ nottin’. Bot he said id woz! So I—” He stopped, regarded her in perplexity, and then uneasily to David. “Don’ she wan’ I sh’ talk t’ huh in Engklish?”

“I don’ know.” He answered sullenly. His mother’s fixed, unseeing stare, her trembling lips, trembling as if to an inner speech, was anguish enough for him to bear without the added humiliation of having Yussie notice it. “Yuh goin’?” he invited.

“Yeh, opstehs! Yuh wonna comm?”

“No!” Inflexibly.

“Bod I’m on’y gonna ged my noo bow’n’ arrer.” He urged. “Den I’m commin’ donn. My modder t’rew huh cussit away, so dere’s big, long w’ite iyons in id. So I wen’ ’an pulled ’em oud. An’ I’m gonna tie ’em all t’gedder. An’ ooo! is id gonna be strong! Way strong! Yuh wanna waid fuh me till I comm down? I’ll call yuh.”

He hesitated, looked up at his mother. Her breast was heaving slowly, deeply, making a slight moaning creak in her throat. Her eyes, unwinking, round and liquid, swam in the lustre of unshed tears. For a shattering instant a throng of impulses, diverse, fierce, maddening, hurtled against the very core of his being. He wanted to shrink away, to run, to hide, anywhere, under the table, in a corner, in his bedroom, to burst into tears, to scream at her. So many they paralyzed him. He stood quivering, gaping at her, waiting for her to weep. Then suddenly he remembered! Yussie was looking at her! He would know! He would see! He mustn’t! He whirled on him. “You go op, Yussie! G’wan! Horry op! I’ll waid f’yuh in mine house. Den you come down and den I’ll go! Horry op!”

“Yuh wan’ me t’call ye?” Yussie cast a confused glance over his shoulder at David’s mother.

“Yeh! Yeh! So go!” His shame at the other’s knowing was agonizing. “G’wan!” He opened the door.

His mother sniffed sharply. “Are you driving him out, child?” The flat twang of tears thickened her voice. “You mustn’t do that!”

“No! No!” David reverted desperately to Yiddish. “He’s going by himself! I’m not pushing him!”

“Yeh! I’m goin’!” Yussie seconded him hastily. “I’ll call yuh.” He went out.

“What made you part so abruptly?” She sniffed again, pressed her eyelids down, followed the dark margins with thumb and forefinger, and regarded her humid fingertips.

David hung his head, not daring to look at her for fear of weeping. “He’s coming down to call me. And then we’re both going into the street.”

“Oh, are you friends again?” She lifted weary tearstained eyes to the window. “It’s growing dark. You won’t stay out too long, will you? Nor go too far?”

“No.” It was becoming difficult for him to talk against the choking in his throat. “I’ll get my coat.”

He retreated suddenly into his bedroom. In the brief solitude of finding his coat, his whole body began to quiver. But he tensed it, jammed his lips together to keep them still. The spasm passed. He dragged his hat and coat from the bed and returned.

“I must light the gas,” she said without stirring. “Do you want to come here and sit beside me?”

“No! I–I have to put my coat on.” He struggled into it. He mustn’t, he mustn’t go near her.

She shrugged, not at him, but at herself. “This is the way of the years, my son. Each new one shows you both hands this way—” She held out her two closed hands before her. “Here, choose!” And opening them. “And they’re both empty. We do what we can. But the bitter thing is to strive — and save none but yourself.” She rose, went to the stove, lifted the lid and peered down into the glow that stained the wide brow, the flat cheek. “Eat we must though.”

“I’m going, mama.” He had heard the door slam upstairs.

“You won’t be late for supper, beloved?” She replaced the eclipsing lid, half-turned, “Will you?”

“No, mama.” He went out. His whole being felt crushed, worn out, defeated.

Yussie came tripping down out of the upper shadow, and seeing him below, rattled the dim, slender corset-stays.

“Hey, yuh see watta a bow’n’arrer I’ll hev? I got cawd in mine pocket too, so I’ll tie id.” He joined David at the landing, took his arm. “C’mon! So I’ll show yuh how I’ll tie id over hea an’ over hea in de middle. Den I’ll tie id over hea.”

Descending, they neared the cellar door at which when he glanced, David felt a wave not so much of fear as of anger run through him — as though he defied it, as though he had slammed the door within him and locked it.

“An’ we’ll go maybe by de bobber shop, becuz by de bobber shop now is lighd. He a’ways lighds foist. So we c’n see how t’ do it. Yuh commin?”

“Yeh.”

They came out into the frosty blue of early dusk, turned toward the stores, some of which were lit; there were several children before the tailor shop and the barber’s. They trudged toward it, Yussie flexing the sheaf of corset stays.

“Didja ask yuh modder fuh a nickel fuh de Xmas poddy in school?”

“No. I fuhgod.”

“My ticher calls id Xmas, bod de kids call id Chrizmas. I’ds a goyish holiday anyways. Wunst I hanged up a stockin’ in Brooklyn. Bod mine fodder pud in a eggshells wid terlit paper an’ a piece f’om an ol’ kendle. So he leffed w’en he seen me. Id ain’ no Sendy Klaws, didja know?”

“Yeh.”

“How does a prindin’ press look wot hoitshuh fodder?”

“Id’s like a big mechine.”

“Id don’ go boof?”

“No. Id makes like dat calenduh I woz saving.”

“Oh…”

They neared the group. Annie was still among them. David no longer cared.

“Hey!” Yussie seized his arm eagerly. “Dey’s Jujjy de one wod fell w’en yuh pushed him. Yuh wan’ me t’ make yuh glad on him?”

“Yeh.”

“So tell him f’om de p’lice station. He’ll be glad! Tell me too! So yeh?”

“Yeh.”

“Hey Jujjy!” Yussie hailed them. “Hea’s Davy! He wandsuh be glad on yuh. He’s gonna tell yuh aboud de p’lice station! Aintcha, Davy?”

“Yeh.”