by Henry Roth
A faint, troubled groan ushered in her answer. “I don’t know, Albert.”
“Now be honest!” He suddenly swung the towel into a ball, glared and thrust his lips out. “Answer me with a brunt!”
“What is it, Albert?” She lifted startled, fending hands. “What is it?”
Seeing her alarm, David squirmed back into his chair and watched them apprehensively under the rims of lowered eyes.
“I—” his father broke off, bit his lip. “Was anything said by—by me? Did I seem to be mocking him—when was it?—Friday night? When I told you he was going to a marriage broker?”
“Why, no, Albert!” Her body seemed to slacken. “No! Not at all! You said nothing that would offend any one! I thought he was amused!”
“You’re sure? You’re sure he didn’t leave so early because I—because of some jest I made?”
“No. You said nothing out of the way.”
“Unh! I thought I hadn’t! Well, what fiend is it that eggs him on then? He was like a man with a secret grudge. He wouldn’t speak! He wouldn’t look at me straight. A man I’ve known for months! A man who’s been here night after night!” He pulled a chair toward him, slumped into it. “At noon today, he ate his lunch with that Paul Zeeman. He knows I hate the man. He did that to hurt me. I know!”
“But—don’t—don’t let that upset you, Albert. I mean, don’t take offense at that! It’s—why—” She laughed nervously—“It’s too much like a school-girl’s device—this—this eating with another.”
“Is it?” he asked sarcastically. “Much you know about it! You haven’t seen him all day. It wasn’t only that! There were other things! I tell you there’s something seething in that skull of his! A hatred, for some mad reason! A vengeance biding its time! Do you know?” He suddenly drew back, looked up at her with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “You don’t seem dismayed—you don’t seem downcast enough!”
“Why, Albert!” She flinched before his harsh scrutiny. “I am dismayed! I am downcast. But what can I do? My only hope is that this—this hostility—or what one may call it—is—is only temporary! What can it be? For a time perhaps! Something worrying him that he won’t disclose! Why, it may be all over by to-morrow!”
“Yes. It may indeed! Something may! But my belief is that no man would become a stranger to me overnight unless he thought I had wronged him. Isn’t that so? And he—he’s worse than a stranger—he’s a foe! Avoiding me as if the sight of my face were a stab! Looking past me darkly! Ha! It’s more than something transient! It’s—what’s the matter?”
She was pale. With the glass pitcher in one hand, she strained vainly with the other to open the tap of the faucet. “I can’t open it, Albert! You must have shut it too tightly when you washed. I want some water for the table.”
“Are you weak suddenly?” He rose, strode sourly to the sink, twisted the tap open. “And as for him—” he stared ominously at the gushing water—“if he doesn’t change, he’d better be careful! He’ll find that I can change even more!”
There was a pause, a gathering of strain. Silently his mother set the pitcher on the table, went to the stove and began ladling out the steaming yellow pea-soup into the bowls. Stray drops that fell from the brown pancakes as she transferred them from the pot to the dishes hissed over the stove lids. The odor was savory. But David, glancing hurriedly at his father’s gloomy face, resolved to eat more carefully than he had ever eaten in his life. So far these sombre eyes had scarcely rested on him; now he felt himself trying to contract within himself to vanish from their ken. And failing, concentrated on the frosted moisture of the glass pitcher and how each drop awaited ripeness before it slid.
His father reached for the bread—it seemed to ease the strain. Relieved, David glanced up. His mother came near, her face strangely sorrowful and brooding, incongruous somehow, dissociated completely from her task of carrying a platter of soup. She set it down before his father, and straightening, touched his shoulder timidly.
“Albert!”
“Hm?” He stopped chewing, twirled the spoon he had just picked up.
“Perhaps I should ask you this after supper when your mind is easier, but—”
“What?”
“You—you won’t do anything rash? Please! I beg you!”
“I’ll know what to do when the hour falls,” he answered darkly. “Don’t let that trouble you.”
In spite of himself, David started. Against a sudden screen of darkness he had seen a dark roof, a hammer brandished over pale and staring cobbles.
“Pouh!” his father snorted, lowering his spoon. “Salt? Don’t you use that any more?”
“Not salted? I’m sorry Albert! Everything I’ve done today has gone awry—even the soup!” She laughed desperately. “I’m a good cook!”
“What should trouble you so much?” His sharp gaze rested on David. “Has he been lost again or up to some new madness?”
“No! No! Not him—! Begin eating, child! Not him! I don’t know! Nothing I did today had my eyes and my wits in the doing. Every hour brought some fresh confusion. It was one of those fateful days that make people superstitious. There’s a handkerchief in the yard this very moment. Who knows what made me drop it!”
His father shrugged. “At least you were alone. There was no one watching you! No one prodding you with his eyes into blunders.”
“You mean—him again?”
“Yes! Him! Twice I didn’t feed the sheet into the press just so. They wrinkled, crushed! The underpad was inked! I was ten minutes each time cleaning them! I tell you he gloated! I saw him!” He stopped eating, hammered the spoon on the table. “There’s evil brewing inside him! He’s waiting, waiting for something! I could feel his eyes on my back all day, but never there when I turned to face him! It took my mind off my work! I fed the press as though I were lame! I couldn’t have done worse the first day I began! Now too soon! Now too late! Now just missing! And then the mussed paper caught in the roller—in the gummy ink. I had to take the whole thing apart! And every minute the feeling that he was watching me. Ha!” He breathed harshly. His lips writhed back and his words battered against the barred teeth. “It’s more than I can bear! It’s more than I’ll stand! If he’s waiting for something, he’ll get it!”
“Albert!” She had stopped eating as well and was gazing at him panic stricken. “Don’t—!” Her unsteady fingers closed her lips.
“I tell you he’ll hear from me! I’m no lamb!”
“If—if it’s that bad, Albert. If it doesn’t change, and he’s—he’s that way—why don’t you l-leave! There are other places!”
“Leave?” He repeated ominously. “Leave! So. But the first man I’ve ever trusted in this cursed land to treat me like a foe. The worst of all! Leave!” He stared at his plate bitterly, shook his head. “You’re a strange one yourself. You’ve trembled every time I had a new job—trembled for me to keep it. I could read it in your face—you pressed me to be patient. And now you urge me to leave. Well, we’ll see! We’ll see! But when I leave he’ll know it, never fear! And do me a favor. Take those plates away.” He nodded toward Luter’s place. “It’s as though someone were dead.”
XVI
TUESDAY afternoon, his mother’s drawn, distracted face was too much for him to bear. Without asking her to wait in the hallway, he had fled into the street, and without calling to her, had come up again, alone. Neither Annie, who never hobbled past without sticking out her awl-like tongue, nor Yussie’s reiterated, “Cry-baby,” nor the cellar-door at the end of the vacant hallway were half as painful to endure as the stiff anguish in his mother’s face or the numb silence of the hours of waiting for his father. Again and again, he could almost have wished that by some miracle Luter would return, would be there beside his father when the door was opened. But his mother set only three places around the table. There would be no miracle then. She knew. Luter would never return!
And when his father came home, he came in alone again. The sight of him this eve
ning was terrifying. Never, not even the night he had beaten David, did he radiate, so fell, so electric a fury. It was as though his whole body were smouldering, a stark, throbbing, curdling emanation flowed from him, a dark, corrosive haze that was all the more fearful because David sensed how thin an aura it was of the terrific volcano clamped within. He refused to speak. He scarcely touched his food. His eyelids, normally narrow, seemed to have stretched beyond human roundness, revealing the whole globe of the eye in which the black pupils almost engulfed the brown. He looked at no one. His mad, burnished gaze roved constantly above their heads along the walls as if he were tracing and retracing the line of the moulding beneath the ceiling. Between the hollow of mouth and chin, his twitching lips threw a continual flicker of shadow. There was a place above the stiff sickle nostrils that looked dented—so pinched and white they were. Only once did he break his silence and then only for a brief time in a voice as harsh and labored as a croak.
“Flour? Why? Two sacks of flour? Two? Under the shelf? Under the Passover dishes?”
She stared at him mutely, too bewildered, too panic-stricken to answer.
“Hanh? Are they going to wall you in? Or is the long lean year crouching?”
Her whole body before she answered quivered forward as though shaking off layers and layers of some muffling, suffocating fabric.
“Flour!” Her voice under the strain was high-pitched and hysteric. “A sale at the grocer’s. Nev-Neven’s Street! There in that market!” She trembled again, swallowed, striving desperately to calm herself. “I thought since we used so much, it would be wise to—oh!” She sprang to her feet in horror. “You mean why did I leave them under the Passover dishes! I’ll take them away! This moment!”
“No! No! Leave them! Leave them! Leave them!” (David thought the fierce crescendo of his voice would never end) “Sit down. The mice won’t get them!”
She sat down stunned. “I’ll get them later,” she said dully. “I shouldn’t have left them there. I can no longer think.” And taking a deep breath. “One is tempted to buy more than one needs these days, things are so cheap. Is there anything you’d like me to get you? Smoked salmon? Sour cream, thick almost as butter. They say they mix flour into it! Black olives?”
“My head is splitting.” His eyes were roving along the walls again. “Don’t say more than you can help.”
“Can’t I do something for you? A cold compress?”
“No.”
She shut her eyes, rocked slightly and said no more.
David would have whimpered, but dared not. The intolerable minutes unreeled from an endless spool of nightmare.…
By Wednesday afternoon, another and even more disturbing change had come over his mother. Yesterday afternoon and the day before, she had been impatient with him, unresponsive to his questions, distracted, disjointed in her answers. Now she listened to him with a fixity that made him increasingly uneasy. Wherever he walked about the kitchen, wherever he stood or sat, her eyes followed him, and there was something so fervent, so focused in her gaze that he found his own eyes not daring to meet hers. She did not chide him to-day for dawdling over his after-school bread and butter, or postponing the moment of having to go down. On the contrary, everything was reversed. This afternoon it was he who ate rapidly in order to be ready to go down sooner, and it was his mother who sought to delay him. “And what else?” She would ask. The moment he had completed narrating some incident in school. “And what else happened? What did you see then?” And always her tone had the same rapt, insistent note, and she hung on his every word with such a feverish hungered gaze that several times a curious shudder ran through him, a chill, as if the floor for a second had opened beneath him and he were plunging down a void.
“But on your way home,” she urged. “You haven’t told me. Was there nothing new?”
“No-o.” He hesitated, his eyes wandering about the kitchen avoiding that over-bright, clinging gaze. When would she be satisfied, he wondered, when would she let him go? Uneasily he rummaged among his memories, found the only thing he knew he hadn’t told her yet. “There was a man yesterday.” He began. “On the street that’s the other side of school.” He paused, hoping against hope her interest had flagged.
“Yes! Yes!” Her voice was like a prod. “Yes!”
“And the man, he was making a sidewalk. Like that.” He palmed the green sheet of oil cloth on the table. “With an iron with a handle. A new sidewalk.”
“They’re building up Brownsville!” She smiled at him with frightening intentness. “And? You unwilling, silent, beloved one! And?”
“And when the man wasn’t looking … and the sidewalk was green—it’s green when it’s new.”
“I have seen that also.”
“And a boy came and the man wasn’t looking—he was pushing the iron here. And the boy stepped on it—like that.” He slipped down from the chair, toed the linoleum, “And made a hole with his shoe. Like that—”
Her face had sagged strangely, lips parting before a slow emission of breath. The taut, pale planes of her cheeks seemed to have slipped the chin-bone, overlapped it. Under the raised brows the intent brown eyes were focused on a distance so vast it returned upon her. In dismay, David stopped speaking and blinking with dismay watched her.
“I heard you! I heard you!” She shook her head breathlessly. “Yes! Yes! I heard you!” Through long corridors of brooding her gaze skimmed toward him again. “Yes!”
“Why did you look th-that way?” He wavered between alarm and curiosity.
“Nothing! Nothing at all! I did that too when I was a girl, stepping on a road, new-made. But mine was black! Nothing! Nothing at all! And then what? What did the man do!”
“The man,” he continued uneasily, “the man didn’t see. And yesterday he did it … When I went to school after lunch yesterday. And now there aren’t any more boards on it. And it’s hard like other sidewalks. Nearly white they powder it. And—and you can jump on it. Like that. And you can’t do anything. But he made that hole. And there’s a hole now. You can even see that little red iron on his shoe—in front. It made a hole too! And there’s a piece of cigarette in it already.”
“Naturally!”
“Why does it get so you can’t make a hole any more—even with an umbrella. A broken one I saw. Only sparks when you hit it.” He ducked under the hungering, round eyes. “You talk now.”
“No, you!”
“Aaaaa!”
“Won’t you?” she coaxed.
“I’m all finished now—with my bread,” he reminded her crossly.
“Do you want some more? Some milk?” The eager intensity with which her words followed one another seemed to squeeze letters out of syllables.
He shook his head, eyed her obliquely.
“You can stay with me for a while, beloved.” She opened her arms for him to come to her. “You don’t have to go down.”
He drooped, pouted, but finally trudged over to her and settled on her knee. All this time he had wanted very much to go down, to escape, but he had again caught a sound of pleading in her voice, an expectancy.
“I—I’ll stay here.”
“Oh, you do want to go down!” She unlocked her arms. “Yes you do! I’ve been keeping you. Come! I’ll get your coat!”
“No! No! I don’t! No, mama! I just—I just wanted to look out of the window. That’s what I wanted.”
“Is that all? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Only open. It has to be open.” Some condition was necessary to justify his hesitance. “Will you open it?”
“Of course!” She suddenly pressed him to her fervently, rocked him against her breast. “What would I do without my son in bitter hours? My son! But, darling, the window with the fire-escape before it. Not the other. Good? Sweet fragment! I’ll get a pillow for you to lean on. Do you want to go now?”
“Yes.” He squirmed free.
“First your sweater then. It’s cold out.”
She fetched it. And wh
en he had pulled it on, both went up to the front-room where she opened the window before the little fire-escape, pulled the heavy white curtains aside, cleared the sill of pots and milk bottles and placed a pillow on it.
“And this you’ll want to kneel on.” She drew a chair up. “It can’t damage it any and you can look out much better. Your mittens?”
“No. I’m not cold.”
She leaned over his shoulder, sniffed the air. “It drills the nostrils. Do you see how blue it’s gotten over there, over those brown houses. How early! In the summer this would be late and Albert soon—” She stopped. The fingers on his shoulders twitched. “Ach! I threw a stone upon my own heart then!” With a slack and suddenly aimless hand she fondled his ears and the nape of his neck. “One cannot hide himself long from his fear.” She groaned softly and began drumming on the window pane just as she had drummed on the table yesterday and the day before. “Will you knit another dream for me if I come up later? No?” She patted his head and walked slowly from the front room.
Moodily, he leaned further out to stare down the street.
On the right there were children near the stores at the end of the block, girls skipping rope. Annie was turning. He could see the brace. When he squinted tightly he thought he could make out Yussie standing beside the boy on a tricycle, but wasn’t quite sure if that really was Yussie. Then he could have gone down and stayed near the house without being molested. It would have been better than just being half in the street and half out. He wondered why it was that one could be half in the street and half out and yet never be able to picture the street and the inside of the house together. He could picture the street and the yellow wall of his house, but not the inside. Once he had seen men tearing down the wall of an old wooden house. You could see the inside from the street—the wall paper and the chandelier, the black thickness between floors, windows, open doors. It was strange. Everything looked shrunken. Everything looked frightened.
