by Henry Roth
She reddened as she shook hands with him and laughed. “You’ve praised everything but the water you drank.”
“Yes.” He laughed also. “And the salt. But I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me if I said their flavor surpassed all others.”
And after exchanging “Good-nights” and patting David’s head (which David wasn’t quite reconciled to) he left.
“Ha!” his father exclaimed exultantly after he had gone. “I told you this cursed wandering from job to job would end. I’m working for Dolman’s Press to stay. Now time may bring something—who knows. There are two other foremen there. I’m as good a pressman as any of them. I know more about that iron juggler than they do. Who knows? Who knows? A little money. In time I might even suggest to him that we try— Well! In time! In time!”
“He looks like a very decent man,” said his mother.
“Wait till you really know him!”
And from Luter’s departure to his bedtime, David never remembered spending so serene an hour in his father’s presence.…
IV
“NOT a single one?” Luter was asking with some surprise. “Not in the old land either?”
The old land. David’s thoughts turned outward. Anything about the old land was always worth listening to.
“Not one,” his mother answered. “Nothing ever came to my hamlet except the snow and the rain. Not that I minded. Except once—yes. A man with a gramophone —the kind you listened to with ear pieces. It cost a penny to listen to it, and it wasn’t even worth that. I never heard anything labor so and squawk. But the peasants were awed. They swore there was a devil in the box.”
Luter laughed. “And that’s all you had seen before you came here to this turmoil?”
“I’ve seen little enough of it! I know that I myself live on one hundred and twenty-six Boddeh Stritt—”
“Bahday Street!” Her husband corrected her. “I’ve told you scores of times.”
“Boddeh Stritt,” she resumed apologetically. He shrugged. “It’s such a strange name—bath street in German. But here I am. I know there is a church on a certain street to my left, the vegetable market is to my right, behind me are the railroad tracks and the broken rocks, and before me, a few blocks away is a certain store window that has a kind of white-wash on it—and faces in the white-wash, the kind children draw. Within this pale is my America, and if I ventured further I should be lost. In fact,” she laughed, “were they even to wash that window, I might never find my way home again.”
His father made an impatient gesture. “Speaking of Yiddish plays,” he said, “I did see one. It was when I stayed with my father in Lemberg, the days of the great fair. They called it the Revenge of Samson. I can see him yet, blind, but shaggy again, waiting his time against the pagans. It moved me greatly.”
“For my part,” said Luter, “I go to the theatre to laugh. Shall I go there and be tormented when life itself is a plague? No, give me rather a mad jester or the antics of a spry wench.”
“I don’t care for that.” His father was brief.
“Well, I’m not mad about it either, you understand, but I was just saying sometimes when one is gloomy it does the heart good. Don’t you think great laughter heals the soul, Mrs. Schearl?”
“I suppose so.”
“There, you see! But listen, I have an idea. You know that the People’s Theatre always gives Dolman the job of printing its placards. Well, it has a stage that is never empty of tears—at least one good death rattle is heard every night. And if you like that sort of play, why I can talk to the agent or whatever he’s called and squeeze a whole month’s pass out of him. You know they change every week.”
“I don’t know whether I want to.” His father frowned dubiously.
“Why, certainly! It won’t be any trouble at all. And it won’t cost you a cent. I’ll get a pass for two, you watch me. I wish I had known this before.”
“Don’t trouble about me,” said his mother. “Many thanks, but I couldn’t possibly go away and leave David here alone.”
“Oh, that can be solved!” he assured her. “That’s the least of your worries. But first let me get the pass.” Luter left early that evening, before David was put to bed. And when he was gone, his father turned to his mother and said, “Well, did I make a mistake when I said this man was my friend? Did I? Here is one who knows how to express friendship, here as well as in the shop. Tell me, do I know a decent man when I see him?”
“You do,” was the mild answer.
“And you with your fear of taking strangers into the house!” he continued scornfully. “Could you ever have a better boarder than he?”
“It isn’t that. I’m glad to serve him dinners regularly. But I do know that most often it’s better for friends to be a little apart than always together.”
“Nonsense!” He retorted. “It’s your silly pride.”
V
TRINKETS held in the mortar of desire, the fancy a trowel, the whim the builder. A wall, a tower, stout, secure, incredible, immuring the spirit from a flight of arrows, the mind, experience, shearing the flow of time as a rock shears water. The minutes skirted by, unknown.
His mother and father had left for the theatre, and he was alone with Luter. He would not see his mother again until morning, and morning, with his mother gone, had become remote and tentative. The tears had started to his eyes when she left, and Luter had said “Come child, do you begrudge your mother the little pleasure she may get to-night?” David had stared sullenly at the floor, aware that a great resentment against Luter was gathering within him. Had not Luter been the agent of his mother’s going? And now how dared he reprove him for weeping when she was gone! How did he know what it felt like to be left alone? It wasn’t his mother.
“Now you look just like your father.” Luter had laughed. “He has just such lips when he frowns.”
There had been something in his voice that had had a peculiar sting to it. Hurt, David had turned away and gotten out his box in the pantry in which he saved both the calendar leaves he collected and whatever striking odds and ends he found in the street. His mother called them his gems and often asked him why he liked things that were worn and old. It would have been hard to tell her. But there was something about the way in which the link of a chain was worn or the thread on a bolt or a castor-wheel that gave him a vague feeling of pain when he ran his fingers over them. They were like worn shoe-soles or very thin dimes. You never saw them wear, you only knew they were worn, obscurely aching.
He fingered one of his newly-found acquisitions. It was one of those perforated metal corks that the barber used to squirt perfumed water on one’s head. One could blow through it, peep through it, it could be strung on a thread. He dropped it back into the box and picked up instead the stretched helix of a small window-shade spring. If one had these on one’s feet instead of shoes, one might bound instead of walk. High as the roof; far away at once. Like Puss in Boots. But if the mouse changed back into an ogre inside the puss—just before he died—I’m a mouse—an ogre!— Then poor Puss would have swelled and swelled and—
Luter sighed. Startled, David looked up. I’m a mouse—I’m an ogre! The thought lingered. He eyed Luter furtively. Unaware that he was being watched, Luter had put down his paper and was staring ahead of him. Something curious had happened to his expression. The usually upturned, affable lines of his face either curved the other way now, downward, or where not curved were sharp, wedge-shaped at the eyes and mouth. And the eyes themselves, which were always so round and soft, had narrowed now, so narrow, the eyeballs looked charred, remote. His upper teeth gnawed the skin of his lips, drawing his face into a brooding frown. It worried David. A faint thrill of disquiet ran through him. He suddenly felt an intense desire to have someone else present in his house. It didn’t have to be his mother. Anybody would do—Yussie from upstairs. Even his father.
Luter rose. David hastily dropped his gaze. Deliberate, brown-clad legs approached (what?) passed by him (he
relaxed) stopped before the wall (peered over his shoulder) the calendar. Luter thumbed the leaves (black, black, black, red, black, black) held up a thin sheaf, and with puckered lips, stared at the date as though something far more intricate and absorbing than the mere figures were depicted there. Then he lowered the upturned leaves slowly, cautiously (Why? Why so carefully? They had only one place they could fall to) and rubbed his hands.
On his way back to the chair, he glanced down at the empty shoe-box between David’s knees, emptied of everything except its calendar-leaves.
“Well!” His voice seemed amused, yet not entirely so, as if crossed by a slight start of surprise. “What are those? Do you get them from there?”
“Yes.” David looked up uneasily. “I save them.”
“Yesterday’s days? What do you want with them? To scribble on?”
“No. Just save.”
“Chm!” His laughing snort sounded unpleasant to David. “If I had so few days as you have I wouldn’t bother about them. And when you’re as old as I am—” he stopped, indulged in a short chuckle that pecked like a tiny hammer— “you’ll know that the only thing that matters are the days ahead.”
David tried not to look resentful for fear Luter would accuse him again of looking like his father. He wished he would go away. But instead Luter nodded, and smiling to himself, glanced at the clock.
“It’s time for you to go to bed now. It’s long after eight.”
He poured the various trinkets back into the box, went over to the pantry and stowed them away in the corner.
“Do you know how to undress yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better go in and ‘pee’ first,” he advised, smiling. “How does your mother say it?”
“She says numbuh one.”
Luter chuckled. “Then she’s learned a little English.”
After he had gone to the bathroom, David went into his bedroom, and undressed and got into his night-gown.
Luter looked in. “All right?” he asked.
“Yes,” he answered climbing into bed.
Luter shut the door.
Darkness was different without his mother near. People were different too.
VI
IN THE bedroom where she had gone to tuck away the tablecloth, David heard the closet drawer chuckle softly close. And then,
“Alas!” came his mother’s voice. “He has forgotten it.” She reappeared, in her extended hand a parcel. “The present he was going to give them. He goes empty-handed now.” She set it down on a chair. “I must remember to give it to him to-morrow, or perhaps he’ll remember and return.”
That Luter might come back disturbed David, he pushed the thought away. He had been looking forward to this evening when he would have her to himself until bedtime. It was the second theatre night. His father had gone alone.
She lifted the kettle of water from the stove, bore it to the sink and poured the steaming water into the basin.
She turned to look at him. “The way you watch me,” she said with a laugh, “makes me feel as if I were performing black magic. It is only dishes I’m washing.” And after a pause. “Would you like another little brother?” she asked slyly, “or a little sister.”
“No,” he answered soberly.
“It would be better for you, if you had,” she teased. “It would give you something else to look at beside your mother.”
“I don’t want to look at anything else.”
“Your mother had eight brothers and sisters,” she reminded him. “One of them may come here some day, one of my sisters, your Aunt Bertha—would you like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d like her,” she assured him. “She’s very funny. She has red hair and a sharp tongue. And there’s no one she can’t mimic. She’s not so very fat, yet in the summertime, the sweat pours down her in torrents. I don’t know why that is. I have seen men sweat like that, but never a woman.”
“I get all wet under here in the summer.” He pointed to his arm pits.
“Yes,” said his mother with peculiar emphasis, “she did too. They told her once—but you never saw a bear?”
“In a book. There were three bears.”
“Yes, you told me about them. Well, in Europe the gypsies—gypsies are men and women, dark people. They roam all over the world.”
“Why?”
“It pleases them.”
“You asked me about a bear.”
“Yes. Sometimes these gypsies take a bear along with them wherever they go.”
“Do they eat porridge?” He had said the last word in English.
“What’s porridge?”
“My teacher said it was oatmeal and farina, you give it to me in the morning.”
“Yes, yes. You told me. But I’m not sure. I know they like apples. Still if your teacher—”
“And what did the bear do?”
“The bear danced. The gypsies sang and shook the tambourine and the bear danced.”
David hugged himself with delight. “Who made him?”
“The gypsies. They earned their money that way. When the bear was tired, people threw pennies in their tambourine— Now! I was telling you about your aunt. Someone told her that if she crept up behind the bear and rubbed her hands on his fur, she would stop sweating under her palms. And so one day while the bear was dancing—”
She stopped speaking. David had heard it too: a step outside the door. A moment later someone knocked. A voice.
“It is only I—Luter.”
With an exclamation of surprise, she opened the door. Luter came in.
“I went away without my head,” he said apologetically. “I’ve forgotten my gift.”
“It’s a pity you had to take all that trouble again,” she said sympathetically. “You left it in the bedroom.” She picked up the parcel from the chair.
“Yes, I know,” he answered, resting it on the table. He looked at his watch. “I’m afraid it’s too late for me to go now. I couldn’t get there before nine and then how long can one stay, an hour.”
David was secretly annoyed to see him sit down.
Luter opened his coat and with an expression of anxious indecision on his face regarded David’s mother. His eyes had a brilliance and restlessness greater than usual. David was again aware of the difficult curves of the man’s face.
“Take your coat off,” she suggested. “It’s warm here.”
“If you don’t mind,” he slipped it from his shoulders, “Now that I have nowhere to go.”
“Won’t they be disappointed when they see you’re not coming?”
“No, they’ll know that the black hour hasn’t seized me.” He laughed. “Please go on with your work, don’t let me interfere.”
“I was merely washing some dishes,” she said. “I’ve finished now, except for these pots.” She picked up the red and white can of powder in the corner of the small shelf above the sink, shook some of it into a pot, and rubbed the inside vigorously with a dish rag, stooping over with the effort.
David, who was leaning from the side of his chair could see Luter and his mother at the same time. Absorbed in watching his mother, he would have paid little attention to Luter, but the sudden oblique shifting of Luter’s eyes toward himself drew his own gaze toward them. Luter, his eyes narrowed by a fixed yawn, was staring at his mother, at her hips. For the first time, David was aware of how her flesh, confined by the skirt, formed separate molds against it. He felt suddenly bewildered, struggling with something in his mind that would not become a thought.
“You women,” said Luter sympathetically, “especially when you marry must work like slaves.”
“It isn’t quite so bad as all that. Despite the ancient proverb.”
“No,” said Luter meditatively, “anything may be lived. But to labor without thanks that’s bitter.”
“True. And to labor even with thanks, what comes of it?”
“Well,” he uncrossed his legs, “nothi
ng comes of anything, not even millionaires, but esteem gives the trumpeter breath—esteem and gifts naturally.”
“Then I have my esteem,” she laughed, straightening up and turning around as Luter arranged his mouth more firmly. “I have esteem that grows.” She regarded David with an amused smile.
“Yes,” said Luter with a sigh, “but everyone can have that kind of esteem. Still, it’s good to have children.” And then earnestly, “Do you know I have never seen a child cling so to his mother.”
David found himself resenting Luter’s comment.
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right,” she agreed.
“I think so,” he said warmly. “Why, my cousin’s children—the very relative I was going to visit to-night—they are home only when they sleep and eat. At night after dinner, they are up in some neighbor’s house,” he lifted his hand to emphasize the point, “playing with other children the whole evening.”
“There are other children in the house,” answered his mother. “But he seems to make friends with none. It has only been once or twice,” she turned to David, “that you have been in Yussie’s house or he here, has it not?”
David nodded uneasily.
“He’s a strange child!” said Luter with conviction.
His mother laughed condoningly.
“Though very intelligent,” he assured her.
There was a pause while she emptied the dishpan into the sink; the grey water muttered down the drain.
“He looks very much like you,” said Luter with the hesitance of careful appraisal. “He has the same brown eyes you have, very fine eyes, and the same white skin. Where did you get that white German skin?” he asked David playfully.
“I don’t know.” The man’s intimacy embarrassed him. He wished Luter would go away.
“And both of you have very small hands. Has he not small hands for a child his size? Like those of a prince’s. Perhaps he will be a doctor some day.”
