Call It Sleep

BOOK II / The Picture

I

IN FEBRUARY David’s father found the job he wanted — he was to be a milkman. And in order that he might be nearer the stables, they moved a few days later to 9th Street and Avenue D on the lower East Side. For David it was a new and violent world, as different from Brownsville as turmoil from quiet. Here in 9th Street it wasn’t the sun that swamped one as one left the doorway, it was sound — an avalanche of sound. There were countless children, there were countless baby carriages, there were countless mothers. And to the screams, rebukes and bickerings of these, a seemingly endless file of hucksters joined their bawling cries. On Avenue D horse-cars clattered and banged. Avenue D was thronged with beer wagons, garbage carts and coal trucks. There were many automobiles, some blunt and rangy, some with high straw poops, honking. Beyond Avenue D, at the end of a stunted, ruined block that began with shacks and smithies and seltzer bottling works and ended in a junk heap, was the East River on which many boat horns sounded. On 10th Street, the 8th Street Crosstown car ground its way toward the switch.

His own home was different too. They lived on the fourth floor now, the top floor of the house. There was no cellar door, though a door did lead to the yard. The stairs were of stone and one could hear himself climb. The toilets were in the hall. Sometimes the people in them rattled newspapers, sometimes they hummed, sometimes they groaned. That was cheering.

He became very fond of his own floor. There was a frosted skylight over the roofstair housing that diffused a cloudy yellow glow at morning and a soft grey haze at afternoon. After one climbed from the tumult of the street, climbed the lower, shadowier stairs, a little tense, listening to toilets, entering this light was like reaching a haven. There was a mild, relaxing hush about it, a luminous silence, static and embalmed. He would have liked to explore it, or at least to see whether the roof door was locked, but the thought of that height, that mysterious vacancy and isolation dissuaded him. There was something else besides. The stairs that led up were not like the stairs that led down, although both were of stone. Common stairs were beveled to an edge, hollowed to an aching trough by the tread of many feet, blackened beyond washing by the ground-in dirt of streets. But these that led up to the roof still had a pearliness mingled with their grey. Each slab was still square and clean. No palms of sliding hands had buffed the wrinkled paint from off their bannisters. No palms had oiled them tusk-smooth and green as an ax-helve. They were inviolable those stairs, guarding the light and the silence.

There were four rooms in the flat they lived in. There were eight windows. Some faced 9th Street, some faced Avenue D, and one looked out upon the dizzying pit of an airshaft. There was no bathtub. The partition separating the two adjacent washtubs had been knocked down, and they bathed in that. The bottom felt like sandpaper. One had to be careful not to draw too much water or one might float.

At home the routine of life had changed. His father no longer left for work early in the morning to return at night. Instead he left at night, in the incredible depths of night, and returned early in the morning. During the first few nights, his father’s arising from bed had wakened him also, and he had lain perfectly quiet, listening to the slow heavy tread in the kitchen that was followed soon by the alternate sounds of a bare foot and a shod foot, and then the running water and the scuffing chairs; had lain there listening till his father had left, and then in drowsy thought had followed him down the stone stairs, had imagined in snugness the graduate cold, the night wind on the stoop, the silence, and sunk again through cloudy desolation into sleep.

Brownsville was fading from his mind, becoming soon a troubled nebulous land, alien and diverging. He was glad they had moved away …

II

AT THE beginning of April, David began hearing rumors of an aunt, Bertha, a younger sister of his mother, who was coming to this country. When at first, his mother had suggested that Bertha be permitted to live with them awhile, his father refused to hear of it. Had he not thrown himself at his wife’s feet and begged her to permit Luter to live with them? May fire consume Luter now, but hadn’t he? She had refused then; well he would repay her now. Bertha wouldn’t be allowed in the house.

But David’s mother persisted. “Where could the poor creature go alone in a strange land?”

“Poor creature!” His father had scoffed. As far as he was concerned, let her find a home under earth. He would have nothing to do with her. Did she think he had forgotten her, that gross, ill-favored wench with her red hair and green teeth. And heaven preserve him — her mouth!

But she was only a girl then, forward and flighty. She would have changed by now.

“For the worse!” he had answered. “But I know what you want her here for. You want her here so you can spend the entire day clacking your tongue with an endless he-said-and-I-said.”

No, there would be very little of that. Bertha was handy with the needle. She would soon be working and not at home at all. And hadn’t he himself come to this land alone and a stranger? Had he no pity on another in the same plight? And a woman at that! Could he be so inhuman as to expect her to turn away someone of her own blood in this wilderness?

At last, he had been won over and finally growled his consent. “Talking won’t help me,” he said bitterly, “But don’t blame me if anything goes wrong. Remember!”

It was some time in May that Aunt Bertha arrived, and the first thing that David thought when he saw her was that his father’s sarcastic description had not been exaggerated. Aunt Bertha was distressingly homely. She had a mass of rebellious, coarse red hair, that was darker than a carrot and lighter than a violin. And the color of her teeth, if one had to decide upon it, was green. She used salt, she said — when she remembered. The first thing David’s mother did was to buy her a tooth brush.

She had no figure and no vanity about her appearance. “Alas!” she said. “I look like one butter firkin on another.”

A single crease divided fat fore-arm from pudgy hand. Her legs landed into her shoes without benefit of ankles. No matter what she wore, no matter how new or clean, she always managed to look untidy. “Pearl and cloth of gold would stink on me,” she confessed.

Her ruddy skin always looked as if it were about to flake with sunburn. She perspired more than any woman David had ever seen. Compared to his mother, whose pale skin always had a glossy look that no heat seemed able to flush, his aunt’s red face was like a steaming cauldron. As the weather grew warmer, she began using the largest men’s handkerchiefs, and at home she always tied a napkin around her short throat. “The sweat tickles me at the bend,” she explained.

On those infrequent occasions when his mother bought herself a dress, she sometimes frankly preferred to stand rather than sit down and wrinkle it. His aunt, on the contrary, made hers look like a limp rag so quickly that she would take her Sunday afternoon nap in a new dress to get over the feeling that she had to be solicitous about it.

Apart from their complete difference in appearance, David soon observed that his mother and Aunt were worlds apart in temperament. His mother was grave, attentive, mild in her speech: his aunt was merry, tart and ready-tongued. His mother was infinitely patient, careful about everything she did; his aunt was rebellious and scatter-brained.

“Sister,” she would tease, “do you remember that Salt Sea that grandfather used to speak of — by Judah or by Jordan, where-ever it was — no storms and it bore everything? That’s how you are. You use all your salt for tears. Now a wise woman uses some of it for sharpness.” Aunt Bertha used all of it.

III

ON a clear Sunday afternoon in July, David and his aunt set out together toward the Third Avenue Elevated. They were going to the Metropolitan Museum. Sweat runneled his aunt’s cheeks, hung down from her chin, fell sometimes, spotting the bosom of her green dress. With her handkerchief, she slapped at the beads viciously as though they were flies and cursed the heat. When they reached the elevated, David was compelled to ask innumerable people what the right train was, and during the whole trip, she sent him forward to plague the conductor.

At 86th Street, they got off and after further inquiry walked west toward Fifth Avenue. The further they got from Third Avenue, the more aloof grew the houses, the more silent the streets. David began to feel uneasy at his aunt’s loud voice and Yiddish speech both of which seemed out of place here.

“Hmm!” she marveled in resounding accents. “Not a single child on the street. Children, I see, are not in style in this portion of America.” And after gaping about her. “Bah! It is quiet as a forest here. Who would want to live in these houses? You see that house?” She pointed at a red brick structure. “Just such a house did Baron Kobelien have, with just such shades. He was an old monster, the Baron, may he rot away! His eyes were rheumy, and his lips munched as though he were chewing a cud. He had a back as crooked as his soul.” And in the role of the Baron, she tottered onto Fifth Avenue.

Before them, stood a stately white-stone edifice set in the midst of the green park.

“That must be it,” she said. “So they described it to me at the shop.”

But before they crossed the street, she decided to take her bearings and cautioned David to remember a certain brown-stone house with gabled roofs and iron railings before it. Thus assured of a certain return, they hurried across the avenue and stopped again at the foot of a flight of broad stairs that led up to a door. A number of people were going in.

“Whom shall we ask to make sure we are right?”

A short distance from the building stood a peanut-vender with his cart and whistling box. They walked over to him. He was a lean, swarthy fellow with black mustaches and bright eyes.

“Ask him!” she ordered.

“Is dat a museum?”

“Dotsa duh musee,” he flickered his eyebrows at her while he spoke. “You go inna straight,” he pushed out his chest and hips, “you come out all tire.”

David felt his arm clutched; his aunt hurried him away.

“Kiss my arse,” she flung over her shoulder in Yiddish; “What did that black worm say?”

“He said it was a museum.”

“Then let’s go in. The worst we can get is a kick in the rear.”

His aunt’s audacity scared him quite a bit, but there was nothing to do except follow her up the stairs. Ahead of them, a man and woman were on the point of entering the door. His aunt pressed his arm and whispered hastily.

“Those two people! They seem knowing. We’ll follow them till they come out again, else we’ll surely be lost in this stupendous castle!”

The couple before them passed through a turn-stile. David and his aunt did likewise. The others turned to the right and entered a room full of grotesque granite figures seated bolt upright upon granite thrones. They followed in their wake.

“We must look at things with only one eye,” she cautioned him, “the other must always be on them.”

And keeping to this plan, wherever their two unwitting guides strolled, his aunt and he tagged along behind. Now and then, however, when she was particularly struck by some piece of sculpture, they allowed their leaders to draw so far ahead that they almost lost them. This happened once when she stood gawking at the spectacle of a stone wolf suckling two infants.

“Woe is me!” Her tone was loud enough for the guard to knit his brows at her. “Who would believe it — a dog with babies! No! It could not have been!”

David had to pluck her dress several times and remind her that their companions had disappeared before she could tear herself away.

Again, when they arrived before an enormous marble figure seated on an equally huge horse, his aunt was so overcome that her tongue hung out in awe. “This is how they looked in the old days,” she breathed reverently. “Gigantic they were, Moses and Abraham and Jacob, and the others in the earth’s youth. Ai!” Her eyes bulged.

“They’re going, Aunt Bertha,” he warned. “Hurry, They’re going away!”

“Who? Oh, may they burst! Won’t they ever stop a moment! But come! We must cleave to them like mire on a pig!”

In this fashion, hours seemed to go by. David was growing weary. Their quarry had led them past miles and miles of armor, tapestries, coins, furniture and mummies under glass, and still they showed no sign of flagging. His aunt’s interest in the passing splendors had long since worn off and she was beginning to curse her guides heartily.

“A plague on you,” she muttered every time those walking ahead stopped to glance into a show case. “Haven’t you crammed your eyes full yet! Enough!” She waved her sopping handkerchief. “May your heart burn the way my feet are burning!”

At last the man ahead of them stopped to tell one of the uniformed guards something. Aunt Bertha halted abruptly. “Hoorrah! He’s complaining about our following him! God be praised! Let them kick us out now. That’s all I ask!”

But alas, such was not the case; the guards paid no attention to them, but seemed instead to be giving the others directions of some kind.

“They’re leaving now,” she said with a great sigh of relief. “I’m sure he’s telling them how to get out. What a fool I was not to have had you ask him myself. But who would have known! Come, we may as well follow them out, since we’ve followed them in.”

Instead of leaving, however, the man and woman, after walking a short distance, separated, one going into one door and one into another.

“Bah!” Her rage knew no bounds. “Why they’re only going to pee. Ach! I follow no longer. Ask that blockhead in uniform, how one escapes this jungle of stone and fabric.”

The guard directed them, but his directions were so involved that in a short space they were lost again. They had to ask another and still another. It was only by a long series of inquiries that they finally managed to get out at all.

“Pheh!” she spat on the stairs as they went down. “May a bolt shatter you to bits! If I ever walk up these stairs again, I hope I give birth to a pair of pewter twins!” And she yanked David toward their landmark.

* * *

His mother and father were home when they entered. His aunt sprawled into a chair with a moan of fatigue.

“You look as though you’ve stumbled into every corner of the world!” His mother seated him on her knee. “Where have you led the poor child, Bertha?”

“Led?” she groaned. “Where was I led you mean? We were fastened to a he and a she-devil with a black power in their legs. And they dragged us through a wilderness of man’s work. A wilderness I tell you! And now I’m so weary, my breast seems empty of its heart!”

“Why didn’t you leave when you had seen enough?”

She laughed weakly. “That place wasn’t made for leaving. Ach, green rump that I am, the dirt of Austria is still under my toe-nails and I plunge into museums.” She buried her nose under her arm-pit. “Phew, I reek!”

As always, when she indulged herself in some coarse expression or gesture, his father grimaced and tapped his foot.

“It serves you right,” he said abruptly.

“Humph!” she tossed her head sarcastically.

“Yes!”

“And why?” Irritation and weariness were getting the better of her.

“A raw jade like yourself ought learn a little more before she butts into America.”

“My cultivated American!” she drawled, drawing down the corners of her under lip in imitation of the grim curve on the face of her brother-in-law. “How long is it since you shit on the ocean?”

“Chops like those,” he glowered warningly, “deserve to drop off.”

“That’s what I say, but they’re not mine.”

The ominous purple vein began to throb on his temple. “To me you can’t talk that way,” his eyelids grew heavy. “Save that fishwives’ lip for your father, the old glutton!”

“And you, what have you—”

“Bertha!” his mother broke in warningly. “Don’t!”

Aunt Bertha’s lips quivered rebelliously a moment and she reddened as though she had throttled a powerful impulse to blurt out something.

“Come, you’re all worn out,” continued his mother gently. “Why don’t you lie down for a little space while I make you some dinner.”

“Very well,” she answered and flounced out of the room.

IV

“HERE is a man,” Aunt Bertha said vehemently to her sister, “who drives a milk wagon and mingles with pedlars and truckmen, who sits at a horse’s tail all morning long, and yet when I say — what! When I say nothing! Nothing at all! — he begins to tap his feet or rustle his newspaper as though an ague were upon him! Did anyone ever hear of the like? He’s as squeamish as a newly-minted nun. One is not even permitted to fart when he’s around!”

“You’re making the most of Albert’s absence, aren’t you?” his mother asked.

“And why not? I don’t have much opportunity to speak my mind when he’s around. And what’s more, it won’t hurt your son to know what I think of all fathers. His father he knows. A sour spirit. Gloomy. The world slapped him on both chins and so everyone he meets must suffer. But my father, the good Reb Benjamin Krollman, was this way.” And she began to shake and mumble rapidly and look furtively around and draw closer to herself a figment praying shawl. “His praying was an excuse for his laziness. As long as he prayed he didn’t have to do anything else. Let Genya or his wife take care of the store, he had to take care of God. A pious Jew with a beard — who dared ask more of him? Work? God spare him! He played the lotteries!”

“Why do you say that?” his mother objected. “No one can blame father because he was pious. Well, he lacked business sense, but he tried to do his best.”

“Tried? Don’t defend him. I’ve just left him and I know. If I remember grandfather he worked till the cancer stretched him out — after grandmother died. And he was seventy then. But father — God keep him from cancer — he was old at forty — Ai! Ai!” She switched with characteristic suddenness into mimicry. “Ai! Unhappy! Ai! My back, my bones! Slivers of death have lodged in me! Ai! There are dots before my eyes! Is that you, Bertha? I can’t see. Ai! Groaning about the house as though he already stank for earth — God forbid! And not a grey hair in his head. But let one of us get in his road — Ho! Ho! He was suddenly spry as a colt! And could he shower blows? Tireless! Like a bandmaster’s his stick would wave.”

His mother sighed and then laughed acknowledging defeat.

“It was mother’s fault too,” Aunt Bertha added warningly as if giving her an object lesson. “A wife should have driven a man like that, not coddled him, not pampered him to ruin. Soft and meek, she was.” Aunt Bertha became soft and meek. “She let herself be trampled on. Nine children she bore him beside the twins that died between your birth and mine. She’s grey now. You’d weep to see her. Bloodless as a rag in the weather. You wouldn’t know her. Still trailing after him. Still saving him the dainties — the breast and giblets of the hen, the middle of herrings, the crispest rolls! Do you remember how he would stretch out over the table, pawing each roll, pumping it in his glutton’s haste to feel how soft it was? And then hide away the new-baked cake from the rest of us? His nose was in every pot. But whenever you saw him—” she broke off, stretched out her hands in a gesture of injured innocence—“What have I eaten today? What? An age-old crust, a glass of coffee. I tremble with hunger. Bah!”

“I sometimes don’t think he could help it. There were so many mouths to feed. It must have frightened him.”

“Well, whose fault was it? Not mother’s certainly. Why even when she was ailing he—” And at this point she did what she often did in her speech — finish her sentence in Polish, a language David had come to hate because he couldn’t understand it.

“Tell me, would you go back to Austria if you had the money?”

“Never!”

“No?”

“Money I’d send them,” Aunt Bertha asserted flatly. “But go home — never! I’m too glad I escaped. And why should I go home? To quarrel?”

“Not even to see mother?”

“God pity her more than any. But what good would my seeing her do her? Or me? It would only give me grief. No! Neither her, nor father, nor Yetta, nor Adolf, nor Herman, nor even Saul, the baby, though God knows I was fond of him. You see I’m one who doesn’t yearn for the home land.”

“You haven’t been here long enough,” said his mother. “One grapples this land at first closer to one’s self than it’s worth.”

“Closer than it’s worth? Why? True I work like a horse and I stink like one with my own sweat. But there’s life here, isn’t there? There’s a stir here always. Listen! The street! The cars! High laughter! Ha, good! Veljish was still as a fart in company. Who could endure it? Trees! Fields! Again trees! Who can talk to trees? Here at least I can find other pastimes than sliding down the gable on a roof!”

“I suppose you’re right,” his mother laughed at her vehemence. “It appears to me that you’ll grow from green to yellow in this land years before I do. Yes, there are other pastimes here than—” She broke off, flinched even though she laughed. “That sliver of wood in your flesh! Dear God you were rash!”

“It was nothing! Nothing!” Aunt Bertha chuckled lightly. “My rump has forgotten it long ago! But that should prove to you that I’m better off here than I was there. Anyone is! That quiet was enough to spring the brain!”

His mother shook her head non-committally.

“What? No?” Aunt Bertha mistook her gesture. “Can you say no?” She began counting on her fingers. “Ha-a-d A-Adolf come here as a boy, would he have to run away to the lumber camps and gotten a rupture that big? Ha? A-And Yetta-a. She could have found a better husband than that idiot tailor she’s married to. He finds diamonds in the road, I tell you, and loses them before he gets home. He sees children falling into the frozen river and not a child in the village is missing. Awful! Awful! And Herman and that peasant wench. And the peasant looking for him with an ax. You don’t see that in this land! Fortunate for him anyway that he fled to Strij in time, and fortunate too that it wasn’t Russia. There might have been a pogrom! There was nothing to do and so they went mad, and because they were mad they did whatever came into their heads. That’s how I was, and if you want to know, my dear, close-mouthed sister, as quiet and gentle as you were,” her tone became sly—“there was still, well a rumor of some sort. Someone, something-er-done. But only a rumor!” she added hastily. “A lie of course!”

His mother turned abruptly toward the window, and her own irrelevant words crossed her sister’s before the other and finished—“Look, Bertha! That new automobile. What a pretty blue! Wouldn’t you like to be rich enough to own one?”

Aunt Bertha made a face, but came over and looked down. “Yes. What a grinder it has in front of it. Like a hand-organ, no? Do you remember when we saw our first one on the new road in Veljish — the black one?” The least bit of resentment crept into her voice. “You eternal, close-mouth, when will that secret be weaned?”

Something about their tones and expressions, so curiously guarded in both stirred David’s curiosity. But since their conversation on that score went no further, he could only wonder in a vague and transient way what his mother had done, and hope that another time would reveal the meaning.

V

HOSTILITIES between Aunt Bertha and David’s father were rapidly reaching the breaking point. David was sure that something would happen soon if Aunt Bertha did not curb her over-ready tongue. He marveled at her rashness.

On that Saturday night Aunt Bertha had arrived home bearing a large cardboard box. She was later tonight than usual and had delayed the supper almost an hour. The fast had not helped to put David’s father in an amiable frame of mind. He had been grumbling before she came, and now, though she was washing her face and hands with as great dispatch as possible, he could not restrain a testy—

“Hurry up. You’ll never wash that stench off!”

To which Aunt Bertha made no other reply than to bob her ample buttocks in his general direction. Glaring furiously at her back, he said nothing, but savagely toyed with the table knife in his hands.

Aunt Bertha at length straightened up, and apparently unconscious of the rage she had put him in, began drying herself.

“I suppose you’ve been shopping,” said her sister amiably, setting the food on the table.

“Indeed I have,” she seated herself. “I’m coming up in the world.”

“What did you buy?”

“Bargains of course!” his father broke in contemptuously. He seemed to have been waiting for just this opportunity. “The storekeeper who couldn’t lift the head from her shoulders without her knowing it might as well close up shop!”

“Is that so?” she retorted sarcastically. “Speak for yourself! I don’t spend my life hunting for rusty horseshoes. That gramophone you bought in the summer — Ha! Ha! Mute and motionless as the day before creation.”

“Hold your tongue!”

“Your noodles and cheese are growing cold,” said David’s mother. “Both of you!”

There was a pause while everyone ate. From time to time, Aunt Bertha cast her eyes happily at the cardboard box resting on the chair.

“Apparel?” asked his mother discreetly.

“What else? Half the country’s goods!”

His mother smiled at his aunt’s fervor.

“Blessed is this golden land,” she let herself be carried away by enthusiasm. “Such beautiful things to wear!”

“Much good that does you,” said his father over a forkful of noodles.

“Albert!” his wife protested.

Aunt Bertha abruptly stopped eating. “Who was speaking to you? Go snarl up your own wits! You’re one person I don’t have to please.”

“To please me, the Lord need grant you a new soul.”

“To spite you, I’d stay just as I am!” She tossed her head scornfully, “I’d sooner have a pig admire me.”

“No doubt he would.”

“Tell me, dear Bertha,” said her sister desperately. “What did you buy?”

“Oh, a parcel of rags! With what I earn what else can I buy?” Then brightening a little. “I’ll show them to you.”

Casting a hasty glance at her husband, David’s mother put up a restraining hand, but too late. Aunt Bertha had seized a table knife and was already cutting the strings off the box.

“Are we having dinner or going to a fair?” he asked.

“Perhaps a little later—” suggested his mother.

“Not at all,” Aunt Bertha said with vindictive cheerfulness. “Let him gorge himself if he wants to. My appetite can wait.” And she whipped open the box.

Lifting out first one article of woman’s wear and then another — a corset cover, a petticoat, stockings — she commented blithely on each and quoted its price. Finally, she brought into view a pair of large white drawers and turned them over admiringly in her hands. David’s father abruptly shoved his chair around to cut them from his field of vision.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” she chattered on. “See the lace at the bottom. And so cheap. Only twenty cents. I saw such small ones in the store. Some poor women have no buttocks at all!” Then she giggled, “when I hold them at a distance upside down this way they look like peaks in Austria.”

“Yes, yes,” said his mother apprehensively.

“Ha! Ha!” She went on entirely enchanted by the charm of her purchase. “But what can I do? I am fat below. But isn’t it a miracle? Twenty cents, and I can wear what only a baroness in Austria could wear. And so convenient and so neatly cut — these buttons here. See how this drops down! The newest style, he told me. Do you remember the drawers we wore in Austria — into the stockings? Winter and summer my legs looked like a gypsy’s accordion.”

But David’s father could restrain himself no longer. “Put those things away!” he rapped out.

Aunt Bertha drew back startled. Then narrowed her eyes and thrust out stubborn lips. “Don’t shout at me!”

“Put those away!” He banged his fist on the table so that the dishes danced and the yellow noodles cast their long necks over the rim of the platters.

“Please, Bertha!” her sister implored, “You know how—”

“Do you side with him too?” She interrupted her. “I’ll put them away when I please! I’m not his slave!”

“Are you going to do what I say?”

Aunt Bertha clapped one hand to her hip, “When I please! It’s time you knew what women wore on their bottoms.”

“I’ll ask you once more, you vile slut,” he shoved his chair back and rose in slow wrath.

David began to cry.

“Let me go!” Aunt Bertha pushed back her sister who had interposed herself. “Is he so pious, he can’t bear to look at a pair of drawers? Does he piss water as mortals do, or only the purest of vegetable oil?”

His father advanced on her. “I’m pleading with you as with Death!” He always said that at moments of intense anger. His voice had taken on that thin terrific hardness that meant he was about to strike. “Will you put them away?”

“Make me!” she screamed and waved the drawers like a goad in his very eyes.

Before she could recoil, his long arm had swept out, and with a bark of rage, he plucked the drawers from her. A moment later, he had ripped them in two. “Here, you slut!” he roared. “Here are your peaks!” And he flung them in her face.

Raging with fury, Aunt Bertha leapt at him with clawing fingers. The flat thrust of his palm against her bosom sent her reeling to the wall. He turned on his heel, and his eyeballs glaring in demonic rage, he tore his hat and coat from a peg near the door and stalked out.

Aunt Bertha dropped into a chair and began weeping loudly and hysterically. Her sister, her own eyes filling with tears, tried to comfort her.

“Madman! Mad!” came his aunt’s stifled words. “Savage beast!” She picked up the drawers at her feet and wrung them in the frenzy of her anguish. “My new drawers! What did he have against them? May his head be cloven as they are! Oh!” The tears streamed down her cheeks. Stray strands of her red hair parted on her clammy brow and nose.

David’s mother stroked her shoulders soothingly. “Hush, dear sister! Don’t weep so, child! You’ll break your heart!”

Aunt Bertha only lamented the more, “Why did I ever set foot on this stinking land? Why did I ever come here? Ten hours a day in a smothering shop — paper flowers! Rag flowers! Ten long hours, afraid to pee too often because the foreman might think I was shirking. And now when I’ve bought with the sweat of my brow a little of what my heart desires, that butcher rends it. Ai!”

“I tried to save you, sister. You must know what he’s like by now. Listen to me, I have some money. I’ll buy you a new pair.”

“Oh! Woe is me!”

“And even the ones you have there may be mended.”

“May his heart be broken as mine is, they’ll never be mended.”

“Look, they’re torn exactly at the seam.”

“What?” Aunt Bertha opened grief stricken eyes. She stared at the drawers a moment and then jumped frenziedly from her chair. “He threw them at me too, dashed them in my face. He flung me to the wall! I’m not going to stay here another minute! I’ll not endure it another minute. I’m going to pack my things! I’m going!” She made for the door.

David’s mother hastened after her. “Wait,” she pleaded, “where will you run at this time of night? Please, I beg you!”

“I’ll go anywhere! What did I leave Europe for if not to escape that tyrant of a father. And this is what I came to — a madman! May a trolley-car crack his bones! Slaughter him, Almighty God!” And she ran weeping loudly into her bedroom.

David’s mother followed her sadly.…

* * *

Although Aunt Bertha did not move out of their house as she had threatened to do, the next day and the next, there was no exchange of communication between her and David’s father. Dinners at night were eaten in silence, and if either of them required anything of the other, David or his mother were impressed as intermediaries. However after several nights of this embarrassing constraint, Aunt Bertha’s self-imposed shackles grew too much for her. Quite suddenly one evening, she broke them.

“Pass me the herring jar,” she muttered — this time directly at her brother-in-law.

His face darkened when she spoke, but sullenly though he did it, he nevertheless did push the herring jar toward her.

Thus an armistice was signed and relations, if not cordial, were at least established. And thereafter, as much as it was possible for her, Aunt Bertha kept her peace.

“He’s a mad dog,” she told her sister. “He has to run. There’s nothing to do but keep out of his way.”

And she did for many months.

VI

“A HEART full of pity!” said Aunt Bertha derisively. “Yes! Yes, indeed! For plucking a tooth out, he asks only fifty cents. You understand what that means? What will hurt me most is only fifty cents. After my teeth are gone, and I look like my grandmother, God rest her where she lies, then his price stiffens. I can see through these bandits, never fear!”

Aunt Bertha had been indulging herself in enormous quantities of sugary, vanilla “bum bonnies” as she called them, “pinnit brettlich” and “turra frurra” ice-cream. Severe toothaches had followed. Aunt Bertha had claimed that during the last few nights she had felt her mouth expand to the size of half a watermelon. Whether it had actually grown that large, David didn’t know, but looking at her green teeth and red mouth he could see a certain resemblance. After much urging, her sister had finally succeeded in getting her to go to the dentist. Tomorrow night he would draw several of her teeth.

“In Veljish,” she continued, “they say that ‘kockin’ will clear the brow of pain. But here in America — didn’t he call it that? ‘Kockin’?—will clear the mouth of pain.”

His father’s newspaper rustled warningly.

“Cocaine?” said her sister hastily.

“Oh, is that how you say it?”

‘Kockin,’ as David had learned long ago, was a Yiddish word meaning to sit on the toilet.

“And another thing,” his aunt indulged in a sly laugh. “I am going to lose six teeth. And of the six teeth, three he called ‘mollehs’. Now isn’t this a miracle? He’s going to take away a ‘molleh’ and then he’s going to make me ‘molleh’.”

David didn’t know what ‘molleh’ might mean in English. He did know that ‘molleh’ in Yiddish had something to do with circumcision. Aunt Bertha was being reckless to-night …

But if his father had suffered because of Aunt Bertha’s puns, the next night it was Aunt Bertha who was suffering. His mother related what had happened. She had sat down very meekly and very quietly in the dentist’s chair, she had shut her eyes when the needle was put in her mouth, she had behaved very bravely. But when the first tooth was drawn and Doctor Goldberg had told her to spit, she had spat — not in the cuspidor beside the chair, but at Doctor Goldberg.

“Very worthy of praise!” his father snorted. “An example for sages!”

“So!” Aunt Bertha forgot her dolor. “May they pull all your teeth out soon. We’ll see how brave and how clever you are then! At least, it gives me satisfaction to think I spat at him, not at myself. And you!” she turned petulantly on her sister. “You’re very clever too! You saw I was stunned with fright! You saw my eyes were shut because my head was whirling so hard I didn’t know where I was. He said open your mouth, I opened it — wide as a sack! Shut it. I shut it. Spit—! Go look for a spittoon when you’re ready to faint! It serves him right for standing in the way.”

His mother’s lips trembled in laughter, but she pressed them soberly together. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, sister. I know how much you’ve suffered already. I’m sorry! But come! You’re three teeth nearer to those golden kernels you admire so much.”

“Nearer?” She touched the bare red gums gingerly. “Emptier you mean. You’re sure he won’t plant the new ones in the holes he’s made?”

“No! No!” His mother reassured her. “He told you, didn’t he? They hang like a gate.”

“Britches, he called them, no?” Aunt Bertha cheered up ruefully. “Pritchig, he ought to call them, a hearth in other words, there’s such a fire in my mouth. But I will look handsomer soon, won’t I?”

“What else!” Her brother-in-law’s cheek scrolled into a sour smile.…

* * *

After Aunt Bertha’s gums had healed, she began visiting the dentist’s twice a week, and at first complained bitterly and went there only with the greatest reluctance. In the space of a fortnight, however, her attitude underwent a remarkable change. She now began to go there eagerly, expectantly, and to stay sometimes twice as long. There were no longer any complaints, no longer any detailed descriptions of the various types of pain different dental instruments could inflict. All that seemed to have been forgotten. A new excitement had seized her, a guilty excitement that made her run to a mirror and regard herself closely and then look about to see if she was being watched. She began to fuss with her hair and blouse, arch her short neck, smile in a way that would reveal her temporary gold crown, dowse herself with densely redolent perfume. Something was wrong. At least twice a week David was excluded from the kitchen while she bathed in the washtubs. And here it was Autumn. And she bought face powder which caked and flaked on her cheeks and looked very queer and white flecking her reddish eyebrows. Something was very wrong. Presently her visits to the dentist’s increased from two to three times a week and shortly to four.

This unwonted frequency, unwonted eagerness and strange behavior in general had aroused not only the curiosity of David and his mother, but his father’s silent, impassive questioning as well. To his mother’s circumspect inquiries, Aunt Bertha had at first explained that there was much work being done on her teeth, work of a subtle and occult nature, a delicate prying and adjusting that could only be felt but hardly demonstrated. Of course, she confessed with a cryptic giggle, were she to insist, she could probably get the same amount of work done in two visits as easily as in four, but she really preferred going there as many times as possible. It was so pleasant being there now, she explained. There was hardly any pain, or at least so little it wasn’t worth mentioning. One grows accustomed to sorrows, she elucidated. And beside, the waiting room where all the patients gathered was so homelike, and the people so fluent in English that it was both pleasant and instructive to be among them. Also, it was disclosed, Doctor Goldberg’s wife frequently came into the waiting room to chat with them in really “fency Engalish.” And what especially put everyone at their ease was that while Mrs. Goldberg conversed in this very superior English, she also carried on some homely domestic duty such as chipping noodles or mixing the batter of a sponge-cake. Aunt Bertha would show his mother some day how to make a sponge-cake. And so it was all homely and refined. And of course, one had to look decent! And she, Mrs. Goldberg, had introduced Aunt Bertha to a very fine man, albeit a Russian, who was a children’s leggings’ cutter and who was having the identical type of work done to his mouth that was being done to Aunt Bertha’s. His name, by the way, was Nathan Sternowitz, and was he jolly! And so, all over again, it was all very homelike, very jolly and very refined.

Nothing more was said about the matter for a short time — at least nothing while David was within earshot. But on Friday night, a few days later, Aunt Bertha decided to take her sister completely into her confidence. On that night, the dentist’s office was regularly closed and Aunt Bertha remained at home. She had been silent until David’s father had gone to bed, which was at about eight-thirty, and only began speaking when the regular hiss of his breathing could be heard behind the bedroom door. Fortunately for David, it had become his privilege to defer his bed-time till nine o’clock and even later on Fridays and Saturdays, there being no school the following mornings. He heard it all. As it chanced, his mother was at that moment tracing for him the crooked boundary of a pink Austria on the map of a geography book not yet begun in school. And she had just informed him laughingly that Veljish was too much of a dot in reality to be seen even by the combined lights of candle and gas, when Aunt Bertha cleared her throat suddenly and spoke:

“Well, Genya, your man is asleep.”

The cautious, subdued nervousness of her tone made both David and his mother look up. Aunt Bertha was frowning warily and fingering her gold crown. His mother glanced first at her and then at the bedroom door.

“So he is. What is it?”

“I’m not going to the dentist’s tomorrow,” she said bluntly. “I haven’t been going there for weeks — at least not every time I left here. I’m going ‘kippin’ companyih’!”

“Going what?” His mother knit her brow. “What are you doing?”

“Kippin’ companyih! It’s time you learned a little more of this tongue. It means I have a suitor.”

“Then blessed is God!” his mother laughed. “Who is he— But I know! This Sternowitz!”

“Yes. I’ve hinted his name to you. But I don’t want him to know.” She nodded warningly toward the bedroom. “He’d gloat if it went all to smash. That’s why I’ve said nothing.”

“You’re too harsh with him, Bertha,” her sister smiled placatingly. “He doesn’t wish you any harm. Really he doesn’t. It’s his nature. It will be that way always.”

“A bitter nature.” Aunt Bertha rejoined spitefully. “And always is the time one spends under earth. That’s where he ought—”

“Ach, Bertha! Hush!”

“Yes, let’s not talk too much. He may hear me. And after all he is your husband. But you won’t tell him, will you? Not till all is certain. You promise? Remember,” she pointed her remark. “I’ve kept your secrets well.”

Her words sent a sudden wave of curiosity through David. Secrets! His mother’s! Looking up, he saw a deep rose in his mother’s throat and fainter petals dappling the waxen sheen of her flat cheek. Their eyes met. She was silent, touched the water in the candlestick cups that would ultimately quench the flame.

“Forgive me!” Aunt Bertha said hastily. “Really I didn’t mean — I didn’t mean to be so — so thick! May my tongue fall out if I meant to offend you!”

His mother glanced at the bedroom door and then smiled suddenly. “Don’t be embarrassed! I’m not offended.”

“Are you sure?” Aunt Bertha asked hesitantly.

“Why, of course!”

“But you grew so red, I thought I had angered you. Or—” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Is it Albert?”

“No.” She answered calmly. “None of those things. The son was staring in my eyes.”

“Oh!” Aunt Bertha was relieved. “I thought that—” and she fixed on David accusingly. “Are you listening, you rogue?”

“What?” His eyes wandered vacantly from the open book on the table to Aunt Bertha, and dropped to the book again.

“Ach!” Aunt Bertha brushed away her sister’s objections. “He’s dreaming of Veljish, the little oaf.”

“I’m not so sure.” His mother laughed. “But what were you saying? The man is what? A leggings’ cutter?”

“Yes. A children’s leggings’ cutter. He has a very good job and he makes good money. But—” She scratched her head vehemently and left her sentence hanging in air.

“Well, what’s troubling you? Is he so homely? What?”

“Ach! Pt! Do you believe in love?”

“I?” His mother smiled. “No.”

“No! Tell that to your grandmother there in her grave. You’ve read every German Romance in Austria. Do you know?” She looked at her sister as if a new thought had struck her. “I’ve never seen you read a book since I’ve been here.”

“Who has time even to read a paper?”

“They were bad for you.” Aunt Bertha continued after a moment of reflection. “They made you odd and made your thoughts odd. They gave you strange notions you shouldn’t have had.”

“So you’ve told me. And so did father — scores of times.”

“Well, it would have been better if you had listened to him. They spoiled you — understand? You weren’t — not what shall I say? — good. You were good enough, the gentlest of us all. But you weren’t truly Jewish. You were strange. You didn’t have a Jew’s nature.”

“And what kind of a nature is that?”

“Ach!” Aunt Bertha said impatiently. “You see? You smile! You’re too calm, too generous. That’s wrong! That’s bad! Don’t be offended with me, but perhaps you’ve forgotten what a mopish, calf-eyed creature you were. You looked so—” Aunt Bertha’s jaw dropped. Her red tongue hung out. “And so—” Her eyes climbed up into some cranny under the lids. “Always a cloudy look! Not a suitor they brought you would you accept. And there were some among them at whose feet I would have fallen!” She perched her head back further on her shoulders to stress her own worth and the consequent immensity of that gesture. “German Romances! They did that! And then you married Albert — of all the choices to make.”

His mother regarded her with a mixture of perplexity and despair. “What are you talking about? Is it me, yourself or German Romances?”

“Nothing!” Aunt Bertha shrugged her shoulders huffily. “I was talking about love. Lupka—”

There was that Polish again. David felt a twinge of resentment.

“Oh now, I know,” said his mother lightly in Yiddish. “Go on.”

“How can I, when you mock everything I say.”

“I? How?”

“I know you’ve been in love, but when I ask you whether you believe in it, you answer, no.”

“Very well, I do. Listening to you convinces me. But what has that to do with it?”

“You see? Now you do! You’re exactly what father said you were! You were gentle of heart, but only the devil understood you. I’m your sister. You’ve never told me about yourself. You don’t even care to hear what vexes me.”

“Sh!” his mother raised a warning finger. “Now just what is vexing you? Tell me.”

“First tell me why you married Albert.” Her voice suddenly dropped. “After you knew what he had — what kind of a man he—”

“Ach! Hush!” his mother shook her head impatiently. “Bertha, sister, you’re the silliest woman I’ve ever known. What is there to tell? I was the oldest. There were three daughters younger than I — you, Yetta, Sadie — pushing me toward the canopy. What else could I do?”

“Tell that to your grandmother also.” Aunt Bertha continued peevishly. “Father wouldn’t say anything. Mother wouldn’t speak. And yet there was a rumor among us — a saying. But who? Why won’t you—”

“Come! No more!” His mother’s voice was curt, strangely severe for her. “Not here!”

David had just enough time to duck his head toward his geography book before her glance flashed his way. In the pause that followed, he kept his eyes there, intently, rigidly, turning the book now this way, now that, feigning the greatest abstraction. Much that he had heard, he hadn’t quite understood, it was all so vague, flurried, mysterious. Aunt Bertha had a suitor. His name was Nathan something or other. He made leggings. What was love? But he didn’t care about that. He didn’t care if Aunt Bertha had a dozen suitors. What fascinated him, stirred him to the depths, were the two threads he had unearthed, the two threads he clung to. His father had done something. What? No one would say. His mother? Even Aunt Bertha didn’t know. What? What? He was so excited, he didn’t dare look up, didn’t dare move his eyes on his tracing finger. He prayed his mother would go on, would answer, would reveal what Aunt Bertha had been hinting at. But she didn’t. To his great disappointment, she veered suddenly. When she spoke again, her voice had regained its calm.

“Tell me, sister, why are you so irritable?”

Aunt Bertha twisted stubby fingers together, scratched her head frantically, sending the hair pins shooting up out of her red hair. “Because I’m frightened.”

“But why? What have you done in God’s name?”

“Nothing. Do you think I’m a fool! Let that man dare—! But why is it that since you married, everyone in our family has married as I would wish my enemies?”

“I don’t know.” His mother sat back hopelessly. “Are you going to begin that all over again?”

“Haven’t I right to be frightened?” She rubbed her palms against her thighs, thumbed them to see if they were dry and then dried them on her disheveled hair. “Who wouldn’t be if he felt like a calf being led to the shambles?”

“Don’t be foolish, Bertha.”

“There’s a curse on this tribe, I tell you. It’s a bruised seed.”

“Ach!” Impatiently. “Who is he? Tell me about him.”

“I’m ashamed to.”

“Shall we stop talking about it then?” His mother’s look had an air of finality about it.

“No.” Aunt Bertha frowned sullenly. “Even though you wouldn’t tell me about yourself I’ll tell you. Nathan Sternowitz is a — a widower. There you have it! Now you’re satisfied, aren’t you?”

“Well, in God’s name!” his mother relaxed, relieved. “Is that all? Is that why you’ve been plaguing yourself and me? A widower. I thought he was — I don’t know what — without legs or arms!”

“God forbid!” And then eagerly, “So you don’t think it’s a shame, a scandal that I should marry a widower — I’m not really an old maid.”

“Nonsense!”

“But he’s thirteen years older than I am. Thirty-eight, mind you. And ai! he has two children already. It is a scandal!” she moaned dismally. “It is a scandal!”

“It’s scandalous how silly you are!” her sister laughed shortly. “Do you love him?”

“Woe is me, no! And he doesn’t love me either, so don’t ask me.”

“Well?”

“Oh, we’re fond of each other. We laugh a great deal when we’re together. We talk a great deal. But anybody can be fond of anybody who’s fond of — Ai!” she exclaimed desperately. “I’m fond of him! But he doesn’t believe in love! He says that love is a pinch here,” she indicated her ample busts and then her thighs, “and a pinch there and nothing more. And if that’s all it is, then I don’t believe in it myself. But I’m not sure.”

“It really isn’t much more,” his mother’s upper lips creased into a smile. “If you want to look at it that way.”

“But will they laugh at me? The girls in the shop? Or the folks in Veljish? When they hear I’ve married a widower with two daughters? They’re half-grown, you know, ten and eleven.”

“Veljish is too far away to worry about, sister. And even if it were only as far away as that Brownsville we lived in, why should you care? And you of all people worrying about what others think! For shame! I thought you were bold!”

“But to be a stepmother at twenty-five! Or even at twenty-six! What will it be like? To take the place of a woman in her grave? Ai!” She gnawed her thumb. “And they say they always forget and call you sometimes by their wife’s name. Rachel! And she lies in her shroud! It makes me shudder!”

“So that’s what you’re really afraid of? You’re superstitious! Well, if that’s not the silliest thing I’ve ever heard!”

“I don’t know,” she answered spiritlessly. “I hate quiet and I hate death.”

“Then don’t fear! You probably won’t meet either for a long time. I see you’re just a child after all. But listen to me. Women in their shrouds aren’t a bit jealous. It’s the dead within yourself who won’t sleep. That would be the least of my troubles. Still, if you can’t get over it, if the very thought makes you so frightened, why do you want to marry him at all?”

Aunt Bertha’s customary verve and impudence had vanished, and with it her boisterous manner that was part of her even when she spoke quietly. But though her lips drooped and she seemed to address her words to the floor, dully, falteringly, there was still a remnant of stubborn, blunt defiance in her tone and the way she jerked her head. “I’m not handsome — that you know — not even with that new powder on my face — or this bit of gold.” She lifted her lip. “Don’t cheer me! At me no one ever looks — not even on Sunday and you know I’ve stopped sleeping in my new dresses. Money for marriage brokers — may they choke — I haven’t. So what else? He’s the first one to ask me — well really the first — and he may be all. I don’t want to wear my buttocks to the bone sitting in a shop,” her calloused thumb and forefinger began rubbing together, “and weave paper flowers and rag flowers all my life.”

“That’s foolish, Bertha,” her sister remonstrated gently. “You speak as though you had not one good quality, as though you were hopeless. Come, if one has asked, others will.”

“The longer I wait, the more money I’ll have to save. And out of my three dollars a week, if I save anything, it will be a long wait.”

“No, it won’t! Don’t worry so much about saving. Just give the men a chance! You haven’t been in the country long enough. Why, Bertha, New York is full of all kinds of men who would want you!”

“Yes!” was her gloomy answer. “It’s also full of all kinds of glib, limber Jewesses who can play the piano. Go! Go!” she tossed her head petulantly. “By the time I learn to speak this tongue I’ll be what? Thirty! Old and dry! Others have money, others can dance, can sing with their hands so — Tuh-Tuh-ruh! All I can do is laugh and eat — my only talents! If I don’t get a man now—” She waved her hand as if throwing something away. “Maybe I won’t even be able to do that.”

“Ach! You won’t lose your gusto so quickly.” And after a short pause. “What is he like?”

She thrust her lips out deprecatingly. “A Jew, like others.”

“Yes. Well?”

“In appearance, nothing, short as I am and as homely. He’s slender though, and here and here,” she pointed to the peaks of her brows, “his hair is creeping out. What he has is brown, curly. Two small eyes,” she sighed gustily, “a long nose like a hinge. He’s neat. He doesn’t smoke — he’s like Albert!” She snickered significantly. “But he has one habit I’m going to break him of — he cuts his bread into little boxes when he eats. He takes his own knife out and cuts it up. Pheh! But he’s very pliant and he never grows angry. He’s jolly. He tells long yarns. You see I could rule.”

“I see.”

“And I’ll tell you more!” A swell of eagerness washed away her gloom. “He’s not dull! He has schemes for making money. We could get ahead! This week he asked me whether I would like to run a candy store if we were married. He would buy it and I would run it. You know what that means? He could earn money cutting leggings. I would earn money in the store—”

“And the house?”

“To the devil with it! I hate housekeeping! Anyway, his two wenches are big enough to take care of that! A candy store! Life would be lusty that way! Heh! It would be like living at a fair all the time.”

“And you could have your candy that way!” his mother laughed slyly. “You’ll like that.”

“So I would!” Aunt Bertha continued unaware. “Isn’t it queer how it turns out — from candy to teeth to candy?”

“Yes. And may it all be with good fortune!”

“God willing! Then I can bring him here sometimes to have supper?”

“Why, of course!”

“And you won’t say anything to Albert — at least till I tell you, till I’m sure? An engagement ring soon with God’s blessing!”

“No.”

“Ai!” Aunt Bertha put her palms together and prayed, “May he forget Rachel soon, that’s my only wish! And if he doesn’t,” she suddenly screwed her mouth together shrewishly. “I’ll take two stones and pound it out of his head!”

“With you for a wife, I think he’ll forget her soon enough.” His mother smiled …

VII

ABOUT a week had passed. On coming around the corner of Avenue D that afternoon, David spied his mother walking on the other side of the street. She was hurrying toward the house and carried several parcels in her hand. Catching sight of her accidentally this way always gave him an intense thrill of pleasure. It was as though the street’s shifting intricacy had flowered into the simple steadiness of her presence, as though days not hours had passed since he had seen her before, because days not hours had passed since he had last seen her in the street. He bounded across the gutter and after her.

“Mama!”

She stopped, smiled down at him. “Is it you?”

“Yes.” He fell into step beside her. “Where are you going?”

“Home, naturally,” she answered. “Are you coming up stairs with me?”

“Yes.”

“Carry this then,” she handed him a parcel.

Laundry. He knew it by the clean smell and the yellow paper it was wrapped in. “Did the Chinaman give you those sweet candy-nuts?”

“I didn’t think of asking,” she answered apologetically. “A pity!”

“Mmm.” He said mournfully.

“Next time, I will though.”

“What are you carrying there?” he pointed to a small, square newspaper-wrapped object she held in her hand.

“A surprise.”

“For me?” he asked hopefully.

“Well,” she hesitated, “for everyone.”

“Oh!” he looked at it dubiously. It seemed far too small a package to surprise everyone.

They had reached the house and went in.

“Can I see?”

“Yes, as soon as we’ve gotten upstairs.”

At their door at last, he waited impatiently for her to find the right key. They tiptoed in. They never spoke above a whisper in the afternoon when his father was asleep in the bedroom.

His mother opened the newspaper — a picture.

“Oh!” He felt mildly disappointed.

“It doesn’t pass muster?” she laughed.

David examined it more closely. It was a picture of a small patch of ground full of tall green stalks, at the foot of which, tiny blue flowers grew.

“Yes, I like it,” he said uncertainly.

“I bought it on a pushcart,” she informed him with one of her curious, unaccountable sighs. “It reminded me of Austria and my home. Do you know what that is you’re looking at?”

“Flowers?” he guessed, shaking his head at the same time.

“That’s corn. That’s how it grows. It grows out of the earth, you know, the sweet corn in the summer — it isn’t made by pushcart pedlars.”

“What are those blue flowers under it?”

“In July those little flowers come out. They’re pretty, aren’t they? You’ve seen them, yes, you have, fields and fields of them, only you’ve forgotten, you were so young.” She looked up at the walls. “And where shall I hang it? I saw a nail, a nail. When I was a little girl,” she said irrelevantly, “a fire broke out in a neighboring house, and my cousin grew so excited that all he could do was cry — A ladder, a ladder, a ladder! An ax, an ax, an ax! Foolish things people say — There! There’s one.” She carried a chair carefully to the wall, stood up on it.

David had hardly ever seen his mother so animated, so gay before. He felt like laughing at her.

She stepped down and gazed up at the picture she had just hung. “It’s a bit lofty even for corn but it will do. It’s better than a calendar, anyway.”

“What did you get it for?”

She shook her finger at him in playful warning. “We’re having company, don’t you know? Bertha’s ‘kippin-companyih-man’ is coming. Do I say it well? She taught me.” And after a pause. “Are you eager to see him?”

“Aaa!” He shrugged indifferently.

“Ach! What a bad nephew you are! Not even eager to behold you aunt’s new suitor! He’ll be your uncle if she marries him. You’ll have an American uncle then. A yellow one. Did you ever think of that? Of course not! Ach, you!”

David regarded her silently, wondering why that should excite anyone.

“I really believe,” she continued in a scolding, bantering whisper, “that you think of nothing. Now honest, isn’t that so? Aren’t you just a pair of eyes and ears! You see, you hear, you remember, but when will you know? If you didn’t bring home those handsome report cards, I’d say you were a dunce, my only son.”

“I’m going down,” he answered steadfastly.

“Oh, you are a dunce!” she laughed ruefully. “Bertha is right! But wait! You’ll have to be back a little earlier, darling. I must wash you and comb your hair and change your shirt for our visitor’s sake.”

“Naaa!” He was at the door.

“And no kiss?” She caught him by the shoulders, kissed him. “There! Savory, thrifty lips! Don’t be late!”

He went down — wonderingly and just a little disturbed. He didn’t mind being called a dunce. After all, she was only joking. Hadn’t she laughed and kissed him? And beside, if he hadn’t shown any interest in his future uncle, she hadn’t shown any in himself. Forgetting Chinee nuts that way! When they were free too, and she knew how fond of them he was. He wondered if the Chinaman would give him any if he went in now and told him that his mother had just gotten some laundry out — what kind? Shirts. Yes. His father was going to dress up too. Maybe stiff collars, though the parcel didn’t feel that way. Will you give me some nuts, Mr. — Mr. What? She forgot to ask, my mother forgot! Mr. — Mr. Chinee-Chink! Funny. Walk past anyway and look in. Funny. But — what? What? He had been wondering about something he told himself. Yes. Something. But now he couldn’t remember. Not chinee-nuts. No. Company was coming? Maybe, no.

He left the stoop, turned west. The Chinese laundry was near the corner of Tenth Street and Avenue C. He walked slowly, idly, aware but no longer overcome or even troubled by the movement of vehicles and people. He knew his world now. With a kind of meditative assurance, he singled out the elements of the ever-present din — the far voices, the near, the bells of a junk wagon, the sing-song cry of the I–Cash-clothes-man, waving his truncheon-newspaper, the sloshing jangle of the keys on the huge ring on the back of the tinker. There was more blue in the air of afternoons now; the air was brisker fixing houses in a cold, sunless, brittle light. He looked up. They were both gone — the two cages on the first floor fire-escape. A parrot and a canary. Awk! awk! the first cried. Eee — tee — tee — tweet! the other. A smooth and a rusty pulley. He wondered if they understood each other. Maybe it was like Yiddish and English, or Yiddish and Polish, the way his mother and aunt sometimes spoke. Secrets. What? Was wondering. What? Too cold now. Birds go south, teacher said. But pigeons don’t. Sparrows don’t. So how? Funny, birds were. In the park on Avenue C. Eat brown. Shit green. On the benches is green. On the railings. So how? Don’t you? Apples is red and white. Chicken is white. Bread, watermelon, gum-drops, all different colors. But — Don’t say. Is bad. But everybody says. Is bad though.… And he drifted on toward the corner drug-store, glanced at the red and green mysterious fluid in the glass vases and turned right.

But was wondering. He sifted the mind’s trinkets, searching for one elusive. Was wondering. Birds? Not birds. Bad words? No. Before that. When? Aunt Bertha, the new man? No. Can’t find. Funny. Maybe his name? Mr — Mr. What. Yes. Maybe. No — But — Approaching the laundry, he gazed up at the low sign, the dull black letters against the dull red. C-h-Chuh-Ch-ar-ley. Charley, American name. Just like Charley in school. But something else maybe, like Yussie is Joey. Gee, forgot. Yussie! L-i-ng. Ling. Ling-a-ling. Is Jewish. Can’t be. Ling. Don’t like. How it hangs in the butcher shop. Mister Ling.

He stopped, looked at the window and as he was about to step closer, shrill familiar voices hailed him from behind.

“Hey, Davy!”

He turned. They were Izzy and Maxie; both lived in his block and both were in his class in school.

“W’ea yuh goin’?” Izzy asked.

“No place.”

“So w’y wuz yuh lookin’ in de Chinkee-chinaman’s windeh?”

“’Cause my modder god hea de lundry, bot she didn’ ged no nots.”

“So yuh wanna esk?” Izzy caught hold of the idea quickly. “Comm on, we’ll all go in.”

“Naa, I jos’ wannid t’look.” David thought rapidly. “Maybe my modder’ll comm hea after, so I’ll go in.”

With one accord, they drew near the window, peered in under the shade of cupped hands. Within, behind the high-counter, painted green, the queued and slant-eyed laundry-man blew a spray of water on a piece of laundry out of a tin atomizer. He seemed too absorbed in his work to notice them.

“Betcha yuh could ged now!” Izzy urged. “Hey, Maxie, you go in an’ say yuh Davy, like dat. So he’ll t’ink yuh Davy, so he’ll give. So we’ll ged. Yeh? Den Danvy’s mama’ll comm so we’ll ged again.”

“Yaa!” Maxie declined. “Go in yuhself! Dey god long knifes!”

“Like a lady, he looks,” said Izzy reflectively. “Wod a big tail he’s god on his head. Led’s knock on de windeh. Maybe he’ll look op.”

“Maybe he’ll run afteh yuh too.” Maxie objected.

Izzy pressed his nose against the glass. “I knew a Chinky,” he declared. “Wot he didn’ hev no hen’s. So he wrote wit’ de mout’ wit’ dot stick all de funny like dat”—he squirmed and contracted into ideographs—“on de tickets.”

“So how did he irun, wise guy?” Maxie sneered almost wearily. “How did he hol’ de bigl-irun?”

“He didn’ hol’ id. Sommbody else holded id.”

“Yuh see w’ea de Chinee nots is?” Maxie peered obliquely into the window. “In dot box? Yee! yum! yum! Dey break foist easy. Den dere’s inside soft an’ good. Yum! Den dere’s inside black wood. So id’s hod an’ slippery. So yuh hol’ id in yuh mout’, so it gives wawdeh.”

“I know sommbody,” Izzy contributed, “wod he bruck de hod pod wid a hemmeh. An’ inside wuz annuder liddle suft an’ good. An’ inside wuz annuder liddle black one. So he bruck dat. An’ inside wuz anudder liddle suft an’ good one an’ inside wuz unudder liddle hod one. So—”

“So wot?” Maxie demanded belligerently.

“So he lost id.”

“Pfuy!”

They were silent a moment, and then Izzy wistfully. “Bet I could eat a million!”

“Me too!” Maxie concurred eagerly. “W’en’s yuh modder commin’?”

David was startled. He hadn’t thought they would take him seriously. “I don’ know,” he answered evasively and began backing away from the window.

“But yuh said she wuz commin’,” they insisted, following him.

“Maybe she ain’. I don’ know.”

“So w’ea yuh goin’?” They turned south toward Ninth, he north toward Tenth.

“No place.” He looked blank.

“Wadda boob!” said Izzy vehemently. “He neveh hengs oud wid nobody.”

And so they parted.

VIII

WHEN he came home, his father had already risen. Naked above the waist, the upper half of his heavy underwear hanging below his knees, he stood before the sink, drying the gleaming razor between the pinched ends of a towel. Under the blue mantle-light, his shaven face was stone-grey, harsher yet handsomer. The broad spindles and mounds of muscles along his arm and shoulders knotted powerfully as he moved. The muscles on his breast and smooth belly were square and flat. A few dark hairs curled over the white skin of his chest. He was powerful, his father, much more powerful than he looked fully dressed. It seemed to David, standing there before the door that he had never seen him before. And he stood there almost in awe until the single cursory glance his father cast at him, pricked him into motion and he walked waveringly toward his mother. She smiled.

“And now my second man,” she said lightly. “Come! To your labors.”

Looking round while he shed his coat and sweater, he saw that the kitchen was immaculate. The stove had been polished. The linoleum, newly mopped, glistened warmly. The windows were stainless against the blue twilight. The table, already set, had been covered with his favorite cloth, white, with narrow gold lines crossing in broad squares. He unbuttoned his shirt, removed it, slid out of his underwear just as his father was wrestling into his, and glancing at his own slender, puny arms, glanced up in time to see the last flicker of long sinews before the naked arm was sheathed. How long would it be, he wondered, before those knots appeared above his own elbow and those tough, taut braids on his own forearm. He wished it were soon, wished it were today, this minute. Strong, how strong his father was, stronger than he’d ever be. A twinge of envy and despair ran through him. He’d never have those tendons, those muscles that even beneath the thick undershirt, bulged and flattened between shoulder and armpit, No, he’d never be that strong, and yet he had to be, he had to be. He didn’t know why, but he had to be!

“Good warm water,” said his mother filling a basin in the sink. “Now that we’ve a fire in the stove.”

She pulled up a chair before the sink. David climbed up and began washing. Behind him, they were silent a few seconds and then he heard above the water he splashed about his ears, a crackling sound that reminded him of frozen wash bending. And his father’s growl.

“One needs a wedge to get into these sleeves. Do they starch them with plaster?”

“Apparently! I don’t know why they do it.” She paused. “But only this once! And if we suit him, only once more!”

“Hmph!” he grunted while the crackling continued. “Let it come soon! If she thinks I of all people would throw obstacles in her way, she’s out of her head. I wouldn’t wear this plaster shirt if I didn’t hope to get rid of her. You can tell her that for me if that’s why she’s been so secretive.”

“It wasn’t because of that, Albert. She wasn’t afraid you would interfere. But after all, these things happen — well — not very often in a woman’s life, and she wasn’t sure. Besides, she was a little frightened — a widower, a wife in her grave — a little ashamed, you see.”

“Pph! I’d call her fortunate if she were his sixth wife! And as far as he’s concerned, a Russian doesn’t know better and doesn’t deserve better. But these underhanded wiles — Dentists four nights a week, gold-teeth, powder, mirrors! That fidgeting! Only God knew what she was up to!”

“They weren’t so underhanded, Albert!” While she spoke, she pointed out to David, who had turned with dripping face, the towel beside the clean white shirt on the washtub. “Love, marriage, whatever one calls it, does that to one, makes one uncertain, wary. One wants to appear better than one is.”

“It did that to you I suppose.”

“Yes.” She seemed hesitant. “Of course!”

“Bah!”

“Of course!” she reiterated, and then laughing. “You know how the old song goes: In this way and that, one beguiles the groom.”

“Beguiles!” The lean, grey features sharpened. “Beguiles!” And then looking away absently, “Much to beguile — a Russian and a widower.”

“But Albert!” she smiled slyly. “A Russian-Jew is also a man.”

“I grant you.”

“And she’ll make him a good wife. Bertha is shrewd and what counts more she isn’t shy. Clothes, she has no use for. And with a candy store of her own,” she laughed, “there will be nothing for her to spend money on. From what she’s told me, that’s the kind of wife this Nathan wants.”

“If she ever owns a candy-store and if she runs it the way she keeps her room there, then God help her customers. Here when she leaves hair-pins on the floor as thick as a stubble, all one can do is tread on them; there, they’ll eat them, mark me. They’ll be in every tray. And that red fox-tail she wears in her hair, they’ll find it in the ice-cream. Has she ever put anything back where it belonged? Does she ever do anything with care? And the meals she’ll cook him, Almighty God! With that rash, blind haste of hers, his stomach will be like mine the years before you came.”

“Oh, she’ll learn, Albert! She’ll learn! She’ll have to! I couldn’t cook either before I married! After all we had servants when I was a girl — they did all the house-keeping, house-cleaning, cooking.”

“Bah!” he interrupted her contemptuously. “I don’t believe it. She’ll never learn anything! And what does she know about children? Nothing! What a life they’ll lead her! And she them. Two half-grown wenches on her hands the day she marries! Strangers to her. Hi! What a bedlam! A fate to befall one’s enemies! Well!” He shrugged impatiently. “All I ask is to have it over with soon!”

David who had gotten on his clean shirt and tie by this time, maneuvered about to catch his mother’s eye. She opened them wide in pleasure.

“Look how he gleams, your son!”

Impassively, his father’s eyes rested on him, a moment, and away. “Why doesn’t he comb his hair?”

“I’ll do it!” She went quickly to the sink, wet the comb and passed it caressingly through his hair. “It was browner when you were very young, my son. My handsome son!”

His father reached out for the grey milk-route book that lay on the ice-box, opened it impassively, let the page ruffle under his fingers, (David remembered the ink stains once engraved upon them) and scowled.

“This belongs in my coat.” He said abruptly, and was silent.

About half an hour later, Aunt Bertha and the newcomer arrived. Being present when a stranger was introduced to his father was always an ordeal for David, and this time it seemed more trying than ever. Aunt Bertha was flustered and red with embarrassment, which made her speech and her movements all the more hectic; so that her clipped, flighty, whirlwind of words and gestures caused his father to grow as stiff and aloof as if he were carved from stone. When the two men shook hands, his father merely grunted in reply to the greeting, and never meeting the other’s eyes, glared grimly over his shoulders. Mr. Sternowitz, disconcerted, cast a quick, bewildered glance at Aunt Bertha who stabbed her brother-in-law first with a frown of pucker-nosed hate, and then replied with a reassuring, I-told-you-so smile. That dread moment over, at the suggestion of David’s mother, they sat down, and seated, relaxed guardedly.

While conversation, in which David’s father took no part, circulated about the room in short nervous spurts, concerned chiefly with dentists and with the difference between Aunt Bertha’s “absah” and Mr. Sternowitz’s “ulster,” David examined the newcomer. He was, as Aunt Bertha had said, a little man, very long-nosed, blue-eyed, and sallow. A pale, narrow mustache, the tips of which he kept trying to draw down and bite, followed the margin of thin lips. His ears were overly large, soft-looking and fuzzy almost as red plush. In his small mouth as he spoke, gold teeth gleamed, and his sallow brow that knitted easily into long wrinkles, crept up in quick perspectives into the brownish kinky hair. Above his mustache, his face appeared good-natured, meek yet shrewd, below it, despite the small mouth and receding chin, he gave one the impression of peevish stubbornness. Altogether he looked rather insignificant and even a little absurd. And David scrutinizing him felt increasingly disappointed not so much for himself but for his aunt’s sake.

After lauding the dentist — both he and Aunt Bertha had been present the evening an old woman had come to the office to test out her newly-made plates, and after eating a pear and a heavily poppy-seeded roll, had gone away satisfied — Mr. Sternowitz drifted to the leggings business and prophesied that it would soon disappear under earth. Children were wearing far less leggings than before. And it was because of the uncertainty of his future earnings, he informed them hesitantly, that he thought a man’s wife ought to have an independent income — with which Aunt Bertha emphatically concurred. Uncertain at first, but continually spurred on and encouraged by Aunt Bertha and David’s mother, Mr. Sternowitz gradually lost some of his apprehension at the other man’s chill taciturnity and began to speak more freely. However, whenever his eyes met David’s father’s, the expression on his face tended to freeze into one of ingratiating self-effacement. David sympathized with him. He guessed that like himself, Mr. Sternowitz felt the necessity of continually humbling himself before the relentless, unwinking scrutiny of those eyes, the grey unrelaxing visage. Everyone had to bow down before his father, except Aunt Bertha, and as Mr. Sternowitz’s humility and self-deprecation increased, she became more chagrined and defiant.

David’s mother had begun serving supper when Mr. Sternowitz, taking a preliminary nip at his mustache said, “My father was a servant!”

Up till now Aunt Bertha had given vent to her impatience by merely clicking her tongue against the roof of the mouth. But now apparently deciding on more strenuous measures, she inquired in a barbed tone, “And in rainy weather he carried two children on his back to the cheder. Didn’t he, Nathan?”

“Yes.” Mr. Sternowitz lifted hurt eyes from his plate. “So he did. I think I told you.”

“Well, do you have to blare it out to everyone the first time you meet them? Won’t it keep? Isn’t it dry enough? Why don’t you tell us about your mother’s cousin who was a doctor? That’s something to brag about!”

Above his mustache, Mr. Sternowitz looked crushed. “I didn’t think of it,” he said apologetically. But below it, as if some belated impulse thrust it out, his small chin worked its way forward. And he looked confidentially at David’s father. “But he was a servant!” he maintained.

“Yes! Tell them everything!” Aunt Bertha tossed her head resentfully. “And your mother was blind when she bore you and purblind during your infancy. And she fed you vinegar instead of sugar-water. That’s why you’re so homely!”

“One has to speak about something,” he maintained persistently. “Especially if everyone else is quiet.”

“Ach! There’s a forest of somethings!” Aunt Bertha countered fretfully. “I suppose when I go to see your relatives, you’ll expect me to tell them in the first gasp that the only suitor I ever had—” Here she began to gesticulate and grimace violently—“Was a man who s-s-stammered. And when the marriage-broker said to him, Speak! Ox! What does he say, but, D-d-did y-your g-g-grand-m-mother l-like ch-ch-ch-cheese. Bah! Well I won’t!” she concluded breathlessly.

“Have mercy, Bertha!” her sister said “What difference will it make whether he tells it sooner or later. We’re bound to know one another.”

“Perhaps!” was her significant retort.

Dejected, Mr. Sternowitz peeped up furtively from his plate first at David’s father, still unsmiling and aloof, and then at Aunt Bertha, petulant. Then he blinked embarrassedly, tried to laugh, but without success, and uncertainly, “What did you say? I mean you — to — to the suitor?”

“I said, you’ll have to ask my grandmother.” She screwed her lips together tartly. “She’s dead.”

“Ai!” Mr. Sternowitz gnawed his mustache and looked around half-rueful, half-pleased. “She’s going to lead me a fearful life, no? And even if I am a father of children, nothing will help me. Now, my first wife was older than I. But she had no tongue and she submitted. It may be that I’ll have a younger one this time and—”

“And there won’t be any third!” Aunt Bertha grinned maliciously.

“No,” he acquiesced obediently. And then as if to reassure himself, “We’re not married yet, no?”

“Pooh!”

“What was the matter with your mother?” David’s mother asked after a pause.

Mr. Sternowitz, slice of bread in one hand had begun slowly and aimlessly to fish in his vest pockets with the other. “No one knew. The doctors” he shrugged, drew out a pearl-handled pen-knife, “they didn’t know.” His eyes met Aunt Bertha’s. Her severe scowl swept down from his face to the knife. With an oddly remote movement, his neck bent stiffly and he stared at the knife also, turning it round and round as though he had never seen it before. “Er! They didn’t know!” And sighing, “Woe me! A fearful life!” He dropped the knife back into his pocket and bit off too large a mouthful so that speech was engulfed in an oozy palatal smacking.

Aunt Bertha suddenly smiled, fondly, benevolently. “Champ it down, Nathan, my star, then you can tell what happened — or shall I?”

His temples bulging, Mr. Sternowitz chewed faster and shook his head hurriedly. He meant to speak.

“It was this way,” Aunt Bertha ignored him. “He’ll make a yarn of it as long as an ant climbing a mountain. His mother was going blind and so when the doctors couldn’t cure her, his father took her to a rabbi and he cured her. No, Nathan?”

“Yes.” Mr. Sternowitz swallowed glumly.

“Who was the rabbi they took her to?” asked David’s mother.

Mr. Sternowitz cheered up. “Not one of those polite, wellbred rabbis, have no fear. Is it right,” he turned to David’s father for approval, “that a rabbi should allow Russian officers to visit his daughters? Or that they should be ‘fency pipple’ and not wear white socks and high shoes and trim their beards and their ringlets. Ha? No!” He seemed to interpret the other man’s steady gaze. “That’s what I believe. The more ‘fency’ they become, the less of God’s power do they have. Reb Leibish, this rabbi, was so pious that he made his wife turn over the whole day’s receipts to charity. He would keep no money over-night — not even a kopek. Not Reb Leibish! He hated the joys of life. He never accepted the Thursday invitation for the sabbath. He fasted twice a week. That’s what I call a rabbi! And when my father brought her to him, he didn’t say, Go home, I’ll pray to God for a remedy. No. He had God by his side. He said to my father, Let her go! Take your hands away! And then he said, Come here, my daughter! And she said, Where? I can’t see! And he cried out. Look at me! Open your eyes! The Almighty gives you light! And she opened her eyes and she saw! That’s a rabbi!”

“How well she must have seen,” Aunt Bertha patted her mouth vigorously — the sign of expiation for mockery, “if she gave you vinegar instead of sugar-water.”

“Not all at once,” Mr. Sternowitz protested. “But little by little, she saw. When I left Pskov she could see fairly well, but she squinted and — Look!” he laughed and pointed at David. “Look how he’s staring at me. Isn’t that wonderful?”

David ducked his head in intense embarrassment. It was true. Without knowing why he had been strangely stirred by Mr. Sternowitz’s short narrative. He had been staring at him, hoping he would go on. But now he suddenly felt ashamed, feeling all eyes upon him and especially his father’s. He stared down at his plate.

“Do you want to ask me something?” Mr. Sternowitz inquired indulgently.

“No.”

“Sweet Golem with the big eyes!” his aunt teased. “You’ll have to get him a pair of leggins, Nathan. Winter is coming.”

“Indeed, yes! I’ll steal a pair and finish them at home. We must get his size. Such a quiet, quiet child!” he nodded approvingly. “Like—” His glance veered for a moment to David’s father and then retreated hastily to Aunt Bertha again. “Like my daughters,” he said jocularly. “No, Bertha?”

“To the dot!” was her derisive answer. “But they’ll mind me, don’t forget that.”

“What else!” he grinned. “Just as they mind me? How old is he, did you say?”

“This one?” His mother patted his head. “Seven and a few months.”

“He’s well grown, no evil eye!” he dropped his fork and knocked on the table. “Mine are ten and eleven and they’re no taller. Perhaps we’ll match him with one of mine yet.”

“Speaking of matches,” Aunt Bertha suddenly placed a warning finger across her lips. “Nothing must be said to the ‘dentistka’, do you hear, Nathan? Else she’ll sniff around for a marriage-broker’s bounty. A turd I’ll give her!”

“Have you reached that stage already?” her sister laughed. “May joy go with you then.”

“I?” Mr. Sternowitz put out his palms. “I haven’t reached it. She’s reached it — headlong!”

“Is that so?” Aunt Bertha bridled. “Didn’t you tell me last night you were already looking for a candy-store — in a good location — at a corner maybe — and at a reasonable price — and for me! Didn’t you? If you think I’m yanking you too hard toward the canopy, then don’t have Rachel’s engagement ring reset. Pooh I can wait!” The scattering motion of her hand scattered Mr. Sternowitz away. “He’s like all men. He thinks first of how he can use you, then in good time when he’s going to marry you. You can’t have the one without the other with me.”

“Wait! Wait!” Mr. Sternowitz halted her. “What have I said that you burn so! I said that we didn’t hold the yard-stick at a marriage yet. I meant we weren’t engaged yet, that’s all. I was thinking that if I gave you a ring—”

“If you give me the ring!” Aunt Bertha wagged her head mockingly.

“When I give you the ring then! When I give you the ring it will be better that you take it off before going to the dentist’s, you understand? There won’t be any trouble and nobody’ll speak through the nose and we’ll save fifty dollars.”

“Now you’re talking like a sage!” said Aunt Bertha approvingly. “Why didn’t you say that in the first place?”

“Well,” said Mr. Sternowitz uncomfortably. “Only give me room to breathe!”

“Have you found a candy-store that suits you?” asked David’s mother. “I mean have you any in mind?”

“No, not yet.” Mr. Sternowitz replied. “I really haven’t begun to look for them seriously — naturally. But now I will. I know something about them. My cousin had one and I spent whole nights there. There’s only one trouble. Most candy-stores have only two rooms in the back. That’s all right for two people. But we — I mean I — have two children. They’re with my sister now. So when I take them to live with me we’ll need at least three rooms.”

“It’s going to be a hard life,” David’s mother shook her head, “living in the back of a store that way. The hurry and the noise! Wouldn’t it be better to get rooms somewhere else? In the same house, perhaps?”

“If we live somewhere else,” said Mr. Sternowitz, “there go half of the profits. Why throw away money on rent when you can get it free? A place to sleep in is all we need — and a place to eat a breakfast and a supper.”

“I don’t care where we live,” said Aunt Bertha, “as long as we make money. Money, cursed money! What if it is a little uncomfortable. I never refused pot-roast because it got between my teeth. Now is the time to save. Later when we’ve sold the store and made a little money, we’ll talk again.”

“That’s what I think also,” Mr. Sternowitz rubbed his hands.

“Well, hurry to the jeweler then!” She rocked back and forth dreamily. “A little while we’ll struggle; we’ll pee in the dark. And then we’ll have a home. And when we’ll have a home we’ll have a decent home. Thick furniture with red legs such as I see in the store windows. Everything covered with glass. Handsome chandeliers! A phonograph! We’ll work our way up! ‘Stimm hitt’ like bosses! What bliss to wake up in the morning without chilling the marrow! A white sink! A toilet inside! A bath-tub! A genuine bath-tub for my suffering hide in July! A bathtub! Not that radish grate there,” she pointed to the washtubs. “Everytime I take a bath, it stamps a cluster of cherries on my rump!”

Heavy lidded, David’s father frowned, nostrils twitching. David’s toes crawled back and forth upon a small space on the soles of his shoe.

“You hear, Nathan?” As usual, whenever his father’s wrath was kindling, Aunt Bertha never seemed to realize it. And now as before, she launched out unheeding upon a sea of extravagant vision. And almost intoned. “We’ll have a white bath-tub! Hot water! A white bath-tub! Let it be the smoothest in the land! Let it be the slipperiest in the land! Like snot let it be slippery—”

“As you were wont to have in your old home.” David’s father broke his silence with deliberate words.

“So we did!” retorted Aunt Bertha, and with all the resentment of one jarred while drowsy. “Even though it did look like a coffin, it was made of tin and smoother than that sidewalk there! I thought when I came to this golden land, there would be something better to bathe in than a box full of stony burrs that scuff your—”

“Yes, I know! I know!” he interrupted harshly. “You’re very delicately made!”

“And I’ll get a better one!” she added vindictively. “I’ll not be content with a cold water flat. I’ll not live on a top-floor that was meant for goyim and paupers! This is a land where a Jew can make his fortune if he’s got it in him — not to sit piously at a horse’s tail all his life!”

“Bertha!” her sister exclaimed. “Bertha! Have you lost your senses! Don’t make this event fatal!”

By some extraordinary act of will, David’s father controlled himself. He spoke through his teeth—“The sooner you’re on the road to your fortune, the better I’ll like it. And don’t think,” he added with biting significance, “that if I don’t go to your wedding I won’t dance!”

Mr. Sternowitz was looking from one to the other with diffident, half-frightened eyes. “Ai, Bertha!” he attempted lightness. “Are you awful! Over — over a bath-tub to get so enraged! Come, what is a bath-tub!”

“A bath-tub is a bath-tub.” She pouted sullenly. “What a bright suitor I’ve got!”

Mr. Sternowitz squirmed, blinked, dared not look at anyone. The hard-won relaxation of a few moments ago was destroyed entirely and everyone was on guard again. Nor was there any hope of the tension ever easing, since dinner was almost over, and there would be nothing more to divert one. David’s mother assayed a few vague remarks. They went unanswered. In the strained silence, Aunt Bertha, who looked close to tears, kept muttering under her breath—“Begrudges me everything.… His spite, his sour silence … God blacken his destiny.” David looked around fearfully, hardly daring to think of what might happen. Finally, Mr. Sternowitz, after several preliminary coughs, thrust out his chin and smiled with forced and wavering heartiness.

“I’ll tell you Bertha,” he said. “Let us go for a walk. After such a fine dinner, nothing could be better, what? And we can step into one or two stores on the way.”

“Anything!” she answered defiantly. “So long as we get away from here!”

Both rose, rather precipitately, and with a toss of her head, Aunt Bertha hurried into the front room to get their coats, leaving Mr. Sternowitz stranded in the kitchen. He looked about as though trapped, mumbled something about the dinner and watched the front-room door anxiously. In a few seconds, Aunt Bertha returned and both got into their coats. As she fitted her wide hat on over her red hair, Aunt Bertha raised her eyes to the overhanging brim and then stared beyond it at the wall — where the new picture hung.

David started. That was it! Now he remembered! The thing he was searching for! That he forgot down stairs! Funny—

She approached, scrutinized it. “Look, Nathan,” she beckoned him, “what fine corn grows in my sister’s garden. I didn’t see it before.” She turned questioningly to David’s mother.

“I was wondering when someone would notice it,” she laughed. “Perhaps in my haste I hung it too high.”

“Quite pretty,” Aunt Bertha looked at herself in her pocket-book mirror. “Are you starting a museum?”

“No. It was just a whim. And I found the ten cents to gratify it. Wasted money, I suppose.” She looked up at the picture.

“Well, we must go,” said Aunt Bertha resolutely. “I’ll be back later, sister.”

Good-nights were exchanged. Aunt Bertha and David’s father, the former fervid, the latter stony, crossed snubbing glances. Invited by David’s mother to pay them many visits, Mr. Sternowitz accepted without too much zest, and after a bare smile from David’s father, crowded out of the door in Aunt Bertha’s lee. Silence followed. His father tilted his chair back against the wall with a violent thump and stared morosely at the ceiling. His mother cleared the dishes carefully, impinging on a look of anxiety, a look of abstraction. David wished they would talk. Silence only made his father more ominous. But the silence continued, and David feeling himself caught as if in talons of stress dared not move — at least not until his father spoke and eased the strain — and for escape meanwhile, could only stare at the new picture his mother had bought.

He began to wonder vaguely why it had followed him all afternoon, why it had tugged at the mind from the ambush of the mind. It was strange. Like someone trailing you behind a wall. And never know what it was until a few minutes ago. Funny. And then find out it isn’t anything — only a picture of long green corn and blue flowers under it. Maybe it was because she had been so happy when she looked for the nail. She laughed when she hung it up. Maybe that was it. He didn’t know why she was laughing. And she had said he had seen it too, real ones, long ago in Europe. But she said he couldn’t remember. So maybe he was trying to remember the real ones instead of the picture ones. But how? If— No. Funny. Getting mixed and mixed and—

His father straightened suddenly, shoes and chair legs rapping the oil cloth smartly. His anger would break now! David stared at him half-welcoming the easing of the strain, half-terrified of the consequences.

“The vulgar jade!” he snapped. “The slut! How could you both have come from one mother! She and her dirty mouth and her bath-tubs and her manners. A million bath-tubs couldn’t clean her. She and her bath-tubs! Who asked her to come here anyway! I’ve controlled myself long enough. I’ll throw her out of this house yet!”

His mother had hung up the dish-rag and had turned slowly as though loath to undertake the task of appeasing him and stood silent, placing no obstacles in the path of his anger.

“Stabbing me in the back about my earnings. Boasting of the fortune she’ll make and the palaces she’ll live in! Making a fool of me before a stranger. As though I loafed, as though I didn’t sweat for my bread as honestly and as much as any man! But I’ll repay her, don’t fret! No one can treat me that way. I’ve a notion to get up this moment and throw all her belongings out into the hall!”

“They’ll be gone soon enough, Albert. Just be patient a little longer.”

“Be patient with that wasp!”

“You see, she was frightened. She thought perhaps you had maimed her chances of marriage.”

“I? I maim her chances? I’d rather maim her! And that filthy, clapping tongue of hers. She never moves it but my flesh begins to crawl — as though she were scattering vermin on me. Maim her chances! I want to get rid of her!”

“She doesn’t want to stay here any longer than necessary either.”

“She’d better not. And him! He’s harmless. I might have pitied him. I might have thought, the poor idiot, he doesn’t know what he’s getting. Perhaps she’s hidden her true self from him. But now I despise him! A weakling! After what he’s seen and heard to want to marry that — that vile mouth! It would shame the water-carrier in a Russian bath! To give his children into the keeping of such a one. He deserves nothing but scorn!”

“Let him look out for that. Surely he’s old enough and has seen enough and experienced enough to know what he wants. Perhaps he can even learn to handle her, one can never tell.”

“Handle her! That button-hole maker. It takes a whip hand! I say he’d best begin digging his grave. But what do I care?” He shook his head savagely as though enraged at himself for showing any concern about Aunt Bertha’s future. “Let her marry anyone, and anyone her. Let her listen to that fool’s drivel about blindness and vinegar all her life. But if she thinks she can make light with me because she has a man with her, she’d better be careful. She’s jesting with the angel of death!”

“Just don’t mind her, Albert! Please! Let her go her own way. She’ll let you go yours. I know! She’ll probably not bring him here any more than she can help. They’re already talking about rings.”

“Well, as long as she stays here, she’d better be careful or I’ll shorten her stay.” He snuffed grimly through his nostrils, stared darkly before him at the opposite wall. His eyes lit on the picture. He frowned. “On what heap did you find that?”

“That?” Her eyes traveled upward. “On a pushcart on Avenue C. I thought I couldn’t make more than a ten-cent mistake, so I bought it. You don’t like it?”

He shrugged. “Perhaps I would if you had gotten it for some other occasion. But now—” He scowled. “Why did you get a picture of corn anyway?”

“Green,” she said mildly. “Austrian lands. What would you have chosen?”

“Something alive.” He reached for the newspaper. “A herd of cattle drinking such as I’ve seen in the stores. Or a prize bull with a shine to his flanks and the black fire in his eyes.”

“That ought not to be difficult. I’m sure I could find you one of those as well.”

“You’d better let me get it,” he said curtly. And flapping the newspaper open, leaned over it. “I’m apt to be a better judge.”

She lifted her brow resignedly and then glanced at David with a faint, significant smile as though letting him share with her the knowledge that his father had been mollified and danger was over. She turned back to the sink.

IX

ON SUNDAY — a bright Sunday just before Election day — David’s father had gotten up from the table after lunch, and with some curt remark about going to listen to a campaign speech, had left. After he was gone however, Aunt Bertha scoffed at his sudden interest in political candidates and resentfully put her finger on what she declared was the real reason for his departure: Nathan (They all called Mr. Sternowitz by his first name now) was coming to call on her later this afternoon, and so David’s father had gone away merely to avoid him. Which act, Aunt Bertha added venomously, was a very gracious one, albeit unwitting, and one for which she was very thankful, since she saw no reason to inflict that man’s rude and surly presence on poor Nathan Sternowitz. Thus instead of insulting her, she concluded with spiteful triumph, David’s father had really done her a good turn — but now that he had done it, she devoutly hoped he would break a leg on the way to wherever he was going. And when David’s mother objected, Aunt Bertha charitably informed her that had her husband not been the sole support of his family, she would have prayed he had broken both legs. There! Wasn’t that solicitude? And then followed her usual, disgusted query of why her sister had married such a lunatic.

David’s mother had just folded the table cloth and now she waved it warningly at Aunt Bertha. “He’ll overhear you some day, sister, and you’ll pay for it dearly.”

“Even with my head!” she retorted defiantly. “Just so he knows what I think of him.”

His mother shook her head impatiently. “He does know! Don’t you think he’s had enough time to find out? And honestly I’m so weary of keeping you two from flying at each other. Albert must go his own way, but you — you might think of me sometimes and not make it so difficult. Let there be peace for a while. You’re going to get married. You won’t be here very much longer. Are you seeking to make your last months here end in a catastrophe?”

“Not for me!” her sister tossed her red head wilfully. “He won’t throw me against the wall again. I’ll gouge his eyes out.”

His mother shrugged. “Why tempt him?”

“Ach, you make me sick — you and your mildness! Put poison in his coffee, that’s what I’d do.”

And David who was staring at her partly in wonder at her rashness, partly in guilty elation, caught his mother’s apprehensive look directed at himself. And his aunt, detecting it also, added vociferously,

“I would! I would poison him! Let him hear me! I’m not afraid.”

“But Bertha! I am afraid! You mustn’t say those things before — ach!” she broke off. “That’s enough Bertha.” And turning to David. “Are you going downstairs, beloved?”

“Right away, Mama,” he answered. But inwardly, he was too fascinated by his aunt’s bold vituperations to want to leave just yet.

Rebuked by his mother, Aunt Bertha shrugged discontentedly, clucked her lips, wagged her head, but the next moment rebounded in her usual mad-cap fashion, and with head tilted upward bayed some Polish phrases at the ceiling. To David’s mystification, the unknown words seemed to sting his mother, for she stiffened and suddenly exclaimed with uncommon sharpness—

“That’s nonsense, Bertha!”

“Are you angry this time?” Her sister shook down several strands of coarse red hair before a provocatively wrinkled nose.

“Yes! I wish you’d stop!”

“Beloved and holy Name, give ear! She really can get angry! But listen to me! I have a right to be angry as well. I’ve been living with you for six months. For six months I’ve told you every thing, and what have you told me? Nothing! I’m no longer a child! I’m not the fourteen year old I was when you were a grown young lady. I’m about to be married. Can’t you trust me? Won’t I understand? Aaaah!” she sighed vehemently. “Would God, those twins had lived instead of died. They’d have been old enough to have seen, to have known. Then I’d have known too — Well?” She demanded challengingly.

“I don’t want to go into it.” His mother was curt. “I’ve told you before. It’s too long ago. It’s too painful. And further I haven’t time.”

“Bah!” she flopped suddenly into a chair. “Now you haven’t time. It’s just as I said. First—” She lapsed suddenly into Polish. “Very well. You might be forgiven. Then—” Again meaning disappeared. “Then — It’s just as I said! Keep it for yourself! I’ll get married without knowing.” And she was silent, staring morosely out of the window.

At the opposite side of the room, his mother was also silent, also before a window, head lifted, gazing meditatively up at the brown, glazed brim of the rooftop and the red brick chimneys overhead. To David, they looked very odd suddenly, each woman back to back, each gazing out of different windows, one down out of the curtained, noisy, street-window, the other up out of the curtainless, quiet one; one seated, fidgeting and ineffectually trying to cross thick knees, the other standing motionless and abstracted. Despite powder his aunt was ruddy in the sunlight, short-necked and squat beside the open sky; in the thin shadow where she stood, his mother was tall, brown-haired and pale against the cramping air-shaft wall.

And what was it about, he wondered. What did those Polish words mean that made his mother straighten out so? Intuition prompted him. He divined vaguely that what he had just heard must be linked to the sparse hints of meaning he had heard before, that had stirred him at first so strangely and afterwards scared him. Now perhaps he might learn what it was about, but if he did, something might change again, be the something else that had been lurking all the time beneath the thing that was. He didn’t want that to happen. Perhaps he had better avoid it, better go down. Now was the time, before anybody spoke. But what? His breath quickened before a danger that was also a fascination. What was it? Why wouldn’t she speak? He would stay here only until — until— No! Better go down—

“Look David!” Without getting up from her chair, Aunt Bertha was craning her neck to stare out into the street. “Come here. Look how they’re hauling that box.”

David drew near the window, looked down. In the dull street below, their shouts muffled by the window, a swarm of boys of various heights and ages now dragged, now tumbled a bulky packing-box along the gutter, and in their eagerness to lend a hand, impeded one another, shoved one another out of the way, shook fists and forgot about it promptly and grappled with the box again.

“What are they yelping about?” his aunt inquired. “Whose wood is it?”

“It’s nobody’s,” he enlightened her. “It’s ‘Lection’ wood.”

“What do you mean ‘Lection’ wood?”

“They’re going to burn it on ‘Lection’ day. They always make a big, big fire on ‘Lection’ day. That’s where Papa went. There’s pictures on the barrels and all the beer saloons.”

His mother turned from the air-shaft window. “I’ve seen it in Brownsville too, in the open lots. Such is the custom here. To make a fire on the day they vote — it falls on Tuesday. Is Nathan a citizen, Bertha?” she asked placatingly.

“Yes, of course!” Aunt Bertha’s tone was still sulky, the movement of her shoulders as she turned brusquely toward the window again, still offended. “What else!”

Seeing the queer hopeless lift of his mother’s brow, David again resolved to go down. Whatever it was that caused this tension, and it was the most determined he had ever seen between his aunt and his mother, it was not only baffling but disagreeable. Yes. He would go down.

“Well, why are they dragging it now?” Aunt Bertha turned to him peevishly. “Are they going to burn it for a taste of what’s to come?”

“No. They hide it,” he said self-defensively. “In a cellar. It’s in 732 cellar and 712 cellar near where the rabbi is. But yesterday, big men came and a street cleaning wagon, a brown one, and took it all away.”

“And now they’re getting more! Bah! American idiots! Pull their bowels out for a fire in the street they’ll never make. But when it comes to dragging wood for their mothers, they’re too lame, ha? And you!” she demanded accusingly. “Do you haul wood?”

“N-no,” he lied. It was true though that he hadn’t helped get election wood more than once or twice.

“Hum-m-m!” Aunt Bertha sighed with boredom and glanced at the clock. “An hour and a half before my nosey one comes. I feel lonely.”

“Listen to me, Bertha,” his mother said in a suddenly strained voice as though she had resolved upon a step but prayed it wasn’t necessary. “Do you really want to hear?”

David’s heart tripped with excitement. Better go down, his mind warned almost dizzily. Better go down. But instead, he dropped to his knees and crawled vacantly toward the stove.

As if jabbed with a pin, Aunt Bertha had wheeled around half-leaping from her chair. “Do I want to hear?” she exploded. “A question! After these months of asking? Do I want to hear!” She stopped suddenly. Her look of avid interest gave place to one of apology and self-reproach. “No, no, sister! If it’s difficult for you, then say nothing. Don’t even begin! Really I’m ashamed of myself for plaguing you.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” his mother’s smile was at once bitter and forgiving. “One has to speak of these things sometimes. I don’t know what possesses me to want to keep them sealed up so tight.”

“And as I’ve said to you a thousand times,” Aunt Bertha urged reasonably, persuasively, bridling her eagerness. “It was all so long ago, it should be a jest to you by now. And whatever it is, can it frighten me? I know you, sister, how good of heart you are. Too great a wrong you couldn’t have done.”

“It was great enough. Enough for one life-time.”

“Yes?” Aunt Bertha scratched her back against the back of her chair. “Yes?” She settled down receptively.

“There are only three people who know,” she began with an effort. “Mother, father, myself of course, and — and another — in part. I shouldn’t want—”

“Oh! No! No! No! Trust me, Genya.”

David squirmed, shivered with anticipation, fear.

“You remember,” she began and then stopped, her eyes meeting his from where he gazed up at her. “Let it be so.”

The oblique nod of her head seemed to beckon her sister to join her in the realm of another speech. For when she spoke again her words had fused into that alien, aggravating tongue that David could never fathom. Chagrined, he looked at Aunt Bertha. She was leaning forward eagerly the better to devour all that was said, her mobile features sometimes aping his mother’s, sometimes contradicting. Her eagerness tantalized him, goaded him into sharper listening. It was no use. He scrutinized his mother. The color had risen in her throat. Now her eyes stared and were dark and she spoke rapidly. Now they narrowed and the wide brows knit crookedly. Pain. What hurt her? Now she sighed and dropped her hand and her face grew slack and mournful and her slow lids heavy. What? But though he pried here, there, everywhere among the gutturals and surds striving with all his power to split the stubborn scales of speech, he could not. The mind could get no purchase.

Sullen, resentful almost to tears, he rolled over on his back, stared at the ceiling. He didn’t care, that’s all. He wouldn’t tell her anything either. There! He was going down, that’s what he would do. Never tell her anything — But — Listen! That was a yiddish word! A whole phrase! “After the old organist, dead” … Another! “Alone in the store” … A word! “Handsome” … Like mica-glints in the sidewalk, another phrase! “A box of matches” … He turned stealthily to watch her.

“And he seized my hand.” A whole sentence emerged.

Aunt Bertha, who with hand on cheek had been shaking her head in a shocked manner, now beat the air angrily with her fists. “Even if he was educated,” she exclaimed heatedly, “and even if he was an organist, he was a goy! And right then and there you should have sent him looking for his teeth!”

“Hush!” she said warningly and again blotted out import under a screen of Polish.

A little ashamed of himself, but secretly gratified nevertheless, David looked vacantly away. Here at last was something to brood on, perhaps even to worry a meaning out of, certainly to remember. A goy, Aunt Bertha had said, an ‘orghaneest’. What was an ‘orghaneest’? He was educated, that was clear. And what else, what did he do? He might find out later if he listened. So he was a goy. A Christian. They didn’t sound the same. Christian. Downstairs, the janitor was a Hungarian. Christian too. Chrize. Jesus Chrize they said down stairs. Chrize. Christmas. School-parties. Then long ago, remember? Yussie. See him on the stairs, white-iron arrows white-iron, Annie, leg. Christmas. Then no school. Gee! Yea! And new calendars, remember? Lots of pages. Christmas. Jesus Crotzmich, the grocery man said and he always laughed. Crotzmich means scratch me. Jesus scratch me. Funny. And why did Aunt Bertha say hit him? Because he was a goy? She didn’t like goyim. But mama? She did. Wonder? Who was he?

He turned to regard his mother. When would another phrase break from that alien thicket? He waited impatiently, mind beating the coverts … Nothing … Like a fabric the unknown speech flowed on riftless, opaque, until—

“Bah!” Aunt Bertha sheared it with contempt. “All these rogues have tongues on castors!”

“My fault as well!” protested his mother, reverting to Yiddish in forgetful haste. “Toward May I grew so, I spent the whole day waiting for a half hour at twilight. How many times a day did I wish it were winter, mid-winter when the moon is yellow before five. Long before sunset, I was already at the store, and it was all I could do to keep from reminding father to hurry off to the synagogue.”

“Ach! You were mad.”

“But that was only a taste. You don’t know how mad I was—” Her voice took on a throbbing richness now that David had never heard in it before. The very sound seemed to reverberate in his flesh sending pulse after pulse of a nameless, tingling excitement through his body. “Day grew worse than darkness. I welcomed the light only when some Polish townsman died — You recall the priest and the banners and the funeral procession that went through the town? Ludwig was always in the train, chanting the services. I could watch him then as he went by, follow with the others a little ways, stare at him unafraid, Love—”

With the same suddenness as before, meaning scaled the horizon to another idiom, leaving David stranded on a sounding but empty shore. Words here and there, phrases shimmering like distant sails tantalized him, but never drew near.

He writhed inwardly at his own impotence.

It seemed to him, lying there almost paralyzed with the strain, that his mind would fly apart if he brought no order into this confusion. Each phrase he heard, each exclamation, each word only made the tension within him worse. Not knowing became almost unbearable. He felt as if nothing he had ever known were as important as knowing this. Who was Ludwig? Was that he, the goy! Why was he at funerals? What did she mean when she let a word drop about wicker baskets? Attics? Letters? Mere curiosity had petrified into obsession. But still the phrases flickered on as ephemeral and capricious as before, as thwarting — the abrupt and fragmentary glimpses of a figure passing behind the brief notches of parapets.

“And the welcome over … And mother also downcast … But too deep in joy to notice … These things,” she tapped her brow, “they wait their time inside one’s head … Stone under water till the eddies rest … And I sought him … Nowhere … And I remembered it … one glance would comfort me … The attic stairs … And on my nails across the loose boards … The wicker basket lay … Safe I thought … Carefully!” Her clenched hands went up as though she were lifting a heavy lid. “You know how wicker creaks—”

Her sudden, involuntary gasp was like a steep, sheer drop in the level-flowing matrix of her speech. Her hand went to her lips. The horror that came into her face was such that it seemed to David not something thought or remembered, but something she beheld this moment, something present in this very room. A shudder ran through him, watching her, “The light before my eyes grew black! Dear God! There on the very top of the pile of coats lay the portrait. Gazing up at me, there on top!”

“They knew,” Aunt Bertha exclaimed.

“They knew,” his mother repeated.

“But how?”

“I found out later. I had forgotten that mother went through the trunk every summer with camphor.”

“While you were away?”

“No. Before. They sent me away because they knew.”

“Ah!”

“My despair then! My shame! You wouldn’t know unless you had felt it. There are no words. I thought I should faint. I picked up the portrait — They had read the back no doubt. They knew all. Had I—”

And again his mother’s eyes met his and again her speech changed abruptly. David rose to his feet. He couldn’t bear it any longer, this suspense, this waiting for significance to cut the surface like momentary fins of sunken shapes. He was going down, that’s what he was going to do. He wouldn’t listen a moment longer. And if the time came when he knew something they didn’t know, he’d pay them back in the same coin. He’d learn to talk the way the girls talked in the street — alligay walligay. Look at them! They weren’t even noticing him they were so engrossed. Even when he stood up and stared at them, no one paid any attention to him. They wouldn’t even know he had gone into the front room to get his coat. They wouldn’t even know he had gone. No! Then he wouldn’t say goodbye. That’s what. He’d just go down without a word.

He went petulantly into the front room and found his coat. But as he put it on, frustration forced a cunning thought into his brain. He would sit here and wait. He’d give them their last chance. If they didn’t know where he was, perhaps they’d speak in Yiddish again. With the door open between them, he could hear in the front room as well as he could in the kitchen. He sat down stealthily beside the doorway and listened. But even though he was out of her sight, his mother seemed not to realize it. The significance of what she said still continued to be fragmentary.

“Must see him…” The words and phrases pulsed out as before. “Comfort … On the church step … She held both … Fluttered her parasol … Ogled him like a lamp … Lace, elegant ribbons … But old, as I say … Gave her no thought … Finally … And parted … Crossed his path … He followed … Waited among the trees…”

Trembling with silent fury and despair he was about to give up. She would never speak. There was no use waiting, no use hiding. He would hear nothing. But as he pushed himself to his feet, Aunt Bertha’s impatient voice interrupted his mother’s—

“Who was this woman? Speak. Do you know? I’m curious.”

“She? I was coming to that.” This time his mother’s words were entirely in Yiddish and completely intelligible. “When I told him what had happened, that they knew, that I was willing to follow him to the corners of the world, he answered — What folly! Don’t you ever think beyond the morrow? How can I marry you? Where will we go? With what? And he was right. Of course he was right!”

“He may have been right,” Aunt Bertha spat out vehemently. “But cholera choke him anyway!”

He had sat down and now was secretly hugging himself in guilty elation. They had forgotten about him. They had! He pressed closer to the wall and prayed his mother would go on speaking in Yiddish. She did.

“Anywhere, I said. I’m ashamed to tell you, Bertha, but it’s true. I said I’d go with him just as he saw me.”

“What a fool you were!”

“Yes. That’s what he said also. A love affair is one thing, marriage another. Didn’t I understand? I didn’t. I’m already engaged, he said.”

“She!” Aunt Bertha exclaimed. “That older woman you spoke of?”

“Yes.”

“Did you spit in his face?”

“No. I stood like one frozen. You love her, I asked? Bah! he said. Could I? You saw her! I may as well tell you. She’s rich; she has a dowry. Her brother is a road-engineer, the best-known in Austria. He’ll provide the rest. As for me, I’m poor as the dark. All I could ever hope to be is a threadbare organist in a village church. And I refuse. Do you understand? Surely you yourself wouldn’t wish that fate on me! But listen, he said and tried to seize me in his arms. We can go on again. In a little while, after this cursed marriage is over, we can go on again, just as we are. Be just what we’ve always been to each other. No one need know! I pushed him away. Does this make so much difference to you? he asked. Because I must marry? Will you now tear out all the love you held for me?

“I don’t know why? I can’t tell. But suddenly I began to feel like laughing. It was as though everything inside of me were lifting up with laughter. By the mad smile on my face, he must have thought I was yielding, for he seized my arm and said: Look at me Genya! Forgive me! See how poor I am! I haven’t even the clothes decent enough to marry in. Genya, I’ll repay you. Get me the cloth as you love me! Your father’s store! A little while and we’ll be together always!

“How shall I put it into words — the fullest cup of death! It seemed to me that heaven and air were filled with laughter, but strange, black laughter. God forgive me! And words I heard, gnashing in it like teeth. Strange words about roses! I came running, I came running with flowers! Like a child! Good-bye and good-bye! Madness, I tell you Bertha, sheer madness!

“Well, he left me standing there. I came home at last. Mother was already in the doorway, waiting for me. Father wants to see you in the store, she said.

“I knew why and turned without a word and walked toward the store. She was behind me; we both went in together; she shut the door. None of you were there. It was kept secret from you. Father was standing before the counter. Well, my gentle Genya, he said — you know how bitingly he could sneer — Is gall a spicy drink? How does it taste? Does one smack the lips after it? I didn’t answer. All I could do was weep. Weep! So! He was like a mother gone insane. Weep! Ah! He rubbed his paunch as though he were eating a delicacy. Ah! It does my heart great good! Don’t torment me, father, I said. I’ve suffered enough! Ha! he said as if he were shocked. Are you suffering? Miserable, pitiful little child! I kept quiet then and let him have his way. You call that suffering, he cried, Why? Because he held you under him like dung in the privy and drops you now? That was father’s way!” A deep sigh interrupted her.

“I know,” said Aunt Bertha vindictively. “May his tongue also fall out.”

“He kept on. Like screws into my breast his words. Torment more than I could bear. I tried to run past him to the door. He seized me and slapped me across both cheeks.”

Her voice had become strangely throaty now, dull, labored.

“Then nothing mattered. Suddenly nothing mattered. I can’t tell you how, but all pain seemed to end. I shrank. I felt smaller suddenly than the meanest creature crawling on earth. Oh, humble, empty! His words fell on me now as on the empty air. And where will you go? he screamed. Esau’s filth. He has a new one! He has a new one! A rich one! Kicked you out, has he not? You false slut! And meanwhile mother kept crying out, They’ll hear you outdoors Benjamin, they’ll hear you! And he would answer, let them hear me, shall I not howl with a heart on fire. I’m bursting I tell you! I’m strangling! And then he plucked off his black skull-cap and threw it in my face and stamped with his feet like a child in convulsions. Ach! It was frightful!

“Finally mother began weeping. I beg you, Benjamin, she cried, You will overtax your strength. You’ll have a stroke, Stop! Stop in the name of God!

“And father did stop. Suddenly, he fell into a chair and covered his face with his hands and began rocking back and forth. Alas! Alas! he moaned. Somewhere, in some way I have sinned. Somehow, somewhere, Him I have offended. Him! Else why does He visit me with anguish great as this? — You know him!”

“I know him!” said Aunt Bertha significantly.

“Now you may see what you have wrought my daughter, said mother, Was your heart of iron? Had you no pity on a Yiddish heart? No pity on your father? I wept — What else was there to do. Not only is she herself ruined, said father, Let her be! Let her die! But me! Me! And my poor, young daughters and the daughters to come. How shall I marry them? Who will marry them if this is known? And he was right. You would all of you have been on his hands forever. Well, he wished himself dead. Hush, said mother, none will speak; none will ever know. They will! They will, I say! Foulness like hers can never be hidden! And who knows, who knows, tomorrow another goy will find favor in her eyes. She’s begun with goyim. Why should she stop? And he began shouting again. I tell you she’ll bring me a ‘Benkart’ yet, shame me to the dust. How do you know there isn’t one in that lewd belly already — That’s a father for you!” Her words were bitter as she paused.

— Benkart! (Beside the doorway David fastened on the word) What? Know it. No, don’t. Heard it. In her belly. Listen!

“And you defended him before!” Aunt Bertha reproached her.

“Well, I wasn’t entirely innocent.”

“Go on!”

“If you drive her away, mother said, all will know it. You’ve cursed your other daughters as well. I? I cursed them? She! That shameless one! And he spat at me. But you must forgive her, mother begged. Never! Never! She is foul! And so it went on until mother took me by the arm, and said, she will kneel before you Benjamin, she will weep at your feet, only forgive her — Shrunk, I say, less than nothing.” His mother’s voice became curiously flat and monotonous as though she were enumerating a list of items all of equal unimportance. “Mother led me over to him. From her apron pocket, she drew out Ludwig’s picture. I must have left it on the bed when I took it out of the wicker basket. She thrust it between my fingers and she said, lift your eyes, Benjamin. See, she tears it to bits. She will never sin again. Only look at her. He lifted his eyes, and I tore it — once and again and threw myself at his feet and wept on his hand.

“You can’t imagine how awful I felt. I can hardly talk about it even yet, it afflicts me so. But fortunately no shadow ever broke a rock, and one can ask himself why he lives a thousand times and yet never die.”

“Did he finally forgive you?” Aunt Bertha asked.

“Oh, yes! In his fashion. He said, may God forgive you. If you ever marry a Jew I’ll take it as a sign. You see I married one. It was about six months later I met Albert.”

“I see,” Aunt Bertha said. “That’s how it played itself out?” And then eagerly. “And him Esau, swine, did he ever come near you again?”

“No. Of course, I saw him often from afar. And once near — a few days before they left for Vienna. To get married.”

“All the way to Vienna? Hmph! And the town church, may it burn to the ground, didn’t that suit the new aristocrat?”

“No, I don’t think that was the reason. Her brother had some business there, at least so his servants told me who came into the store.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“When?”

“You say you saw him near at hand.”

“Oh. No, we didn’t speak. He didn’t see me. I was standing in the road one afternoon when I saw a yellow cart coming toward me. It had two yellow wheels — The kind the rich drove in those days. And I knew even before I could see who was driving, that it was the brother of his betrothed. He drove in it often to where the men were working on the new road. I hid in the corn field nearby. It wasn’t the brother-in-law this time, but Ludwig himself and the grand lady beside him. They passed. I felt empty as a bell till I looked at the blue cornflowers at my feet. They cheered me. That was the last I saw of him I think.”

— Blue corn flowers? Likes them! Corn! That was—! Inside on the wall! Gee! Look at it later! Listen! Listen now!

“And such was the ugly plague the new road brought with it.” Aunt Bertha mused sourly. “But taking it all in all, you were fortunate, sister, fortunate that someone came to take that enemy of Israel away. If not, if, God forbid, you had married him — Pheh! How frightful! Where would you have hidden your head when the day came and he called you scabby Jew! Oy! You were better dead! So you see,” she suggested cheerfully, “the road didn’t bring evil after all. But just the same,” she concluded with meticulous piety, “may it be God’s will that the maker of the road and his sister and his brother-in-law meet with years as black and as long as that road! No?”

— Road. Black! Black! Where did I hear it before? Black? Not now.

His mother had paused. Now she clucked her lips in a slight sound of distaste. “Well, I’ve told you. And now that I have I don’t know whether I’m glad I did or not.”

“Pooh!” Aunt Bertha scoffed, belligerently. “Why? I promised you I wouldn’t say anything about it. Besides, whom is there to tell? The shop-girls in the flower factory? Well, Nathan perhaps. But he wouldn’t — What are you so afraid of?” she interrupted herself. “Would Albert be jealous if he knew?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tested him. Besides, he doesn’t seem to want to know these things, and so I’m just a little afraid of your — well — rashness! But come!” she said abruptly. “Let’s talk of the living.”

“Yes!” There was alacrity in Aunt Bertha’s voice. “My Nathan will be here soon. Has any of the powder come off my nose?”

His mother laughed. “No. It will take longer than that.”

“I can always smear it down from my nose to my cheeks. That’s the advantage of having plenty there. You know, Nathan is very fond of your baking?”

“I’m happy to hear it. We’ll get some kupfel out.”

“Too bad we haven’t any schnapps.”

“Schnapps? Why schnapps? A Russian wants tea.”

“Yes,” Aunt Bertha laughed. “And thank God he’s a good pliant man and a Jew. I’ll never have a heartbreak such as yours. But one never knows. And tell me,” she switched in her sudden giddy fashion. “Your husband says I do everything with my left hand now that I have an engagement ring. Is that true?”

“Oh, no! Not at all!”

David started. They had begun stirring about the kitchen, and here he was still squatting beside the doorway. They would see him. They would know he knew. They mustn’t. He got softly to his feet, sneaked to the furthest window and peered out intently. Pretend he had just been looking out all this time, that he hadn’t heard. Yes. But now he knew. What? Had anything changed? No. Everything was the same. Sure. Didn’t have to get scared. What had happened? She liked somebody. Who? Lud — Ludwig, she said. A goy. An organeest. Father didn’t like him, her father. And his too, maybe. Didn’t want him to know. Gee! He knew more than his father. So she married a Jew. What did she say before? Benkart, yes, benkart in belly, her father said. What did that mean? He almost knew. Somebody said — who? Where? Gee! Stop asking! Look outside before they come in.

Realizing intuitively the necessity of having to explain his presence in the front room, his eyes swept the outdoors hastily, seeking some object prodigious enough immediately to distract curiosity from himself the moment he called his mother’s attention to it. Beyond the straggly roof-tops was the thin band of grey-green river and the smoke stacks on the further shore. Against the dusty-blue sky above the horizon, the cold, white smoke of an unseen tugboat frayed out and drifted. No. That wouldn’t do. Couldn’t ask anything about those. What then? He pressed his brow against the cold window pane and peered down into the avenue. Passersby walked more briskly now that November was here; they leaned a little in the wind, head sunken in coat-collars, hands in pockets. The breath of horse-car teams and hurrying pushcart peddlars had become visible. Getting colder … Sewers did that too … Saw them when? Could ask why. No. A Negro passed. Was his? Yes. White too. He could ask that. Why does he breathe white if he’s black? No! Dumb-ox! They’ll laugh! But something, something he had to ask, to pretend to be fascinated by or they’d guess—

Two small boys crossed the car tracks on Avenue D and squatted down on the curb. One of them had been carrying a round, tawny-colored object that not until it was set in the gutter against the curb did David recognize it. It was a headless, stove-in celluloid doll with an egg-shaped bottom, the kind that when they were pushed, bounced upright again. He had seen them before in the candy-stores. But what were they going to do? They looked so engrossed, so expectant. He squinted to see better. Exultantly he told himself that here was his excuse, here was the fascinating thing that had kept him there all this time. If only they would hurry up. One of them, apparently the owner, took something out of his pocket, struck it against the sidewalk — a match. Cupping it carefully, he touched it to a cracked edge of the doll — It flared up with a burst of yellow flame. They recoiled. He could hear their muffled shouts. And then one pointed to the spot where the doll had been and where now nothing remained except the char against the curbstone. The other bent down and picked up something. It glittered like a bit of metal. Both stared at it — and David did too from his height.

Behind him he heard his mother mention his name. He turned to listen.

“I lost him somewhere,” she said casually. “Did he go down, Bertha?”

“That’s queer,” was the reply. “I thought I saw him go into — Why I think he must have gone down.”

“Without a good-bye?” His mother’s voice preceded her through the doorway. “Oh!” She looked at him keenly. “Are you still here? I thought — What makes you stay in this cold room?”

“In the street,” he answered, pointing gravely to the window. “Come here, mama, I’ll show you a trick.”

“Oh, then he is here.” Aunt Bertha came in also. “He’s been something too quiet even for him.”

“He’s going to show me a ‘drick’,” his mother laughed. She understood ‘drick’ to mean kick, which in Yiddish had the same sound.

“A ‘drick’,” Aunt Bertha asked grinning. “Where? In the pants?”

“You see downstairs?” he continued soberly. “That boy? He has a green stocking-hat. He burned a doll and he made ‘mejick’. And now he’s got a piece of iron. You see it? In his hands? Look!”

“Do you know what the simpleton’s jabbering about?” Aunt Bertha inquired.

“Not yet.” Smiling, his mother peered down at the two boys below. “Yes. I do see a bit of iron. What do you mean ‘mejick’?”

“There’s a little piece of iron,” he explained. “In that kind of doll. That’s what makes it stand up when you push it over. And the doll burned. And only the iron is left.”

“Aha!” Still smiling, she shrugged. “Well, come into the kitchen anyway. You’ll get a chill here. Do you know it’s growing cold, Bertha?”

David followed them out of the front-room. Easy, he thought in hazy satisfaction. Easy fool them. But they didn’t fool him. Didn’t scare him either. Didn’t change … Gee! The picture! Not now, though. Look at it later, when nobody’s here … Green and blue it’s — Sh!