An early bird of a boy, a demon with the joy of the storm, flung a

snowball at her, missing her so closely that she could taste the

whizz.

"Hello, Square-Head! Square-Head!" And then as the thin air passed

it along and along after her as she hurried: "Hello, Sq-q-uare

Head--Sq-q-quare Head."

The wind had a long whizz to it. Zeouw! It raced around corners, so

that it struck her broadsides and jerked her breath away. It rose up

under her hat and set it on end like a plate on a juggler's brow. It

sent up spiral snow ghosts in front of her and blew flurries of them

into her mouth. It caught at her skirts and tore up under, chapping

her knees. It tweaked her ears until the lobes were red and swollen

and shiny. Zeouw! The Inverness cape went up over her head like an

inside out umbrella and her skirts blew forward and the outline of

her big legs sprang out. A gilt boot over a cobbler's shop blew down

and grazed her by an inch. She was winded and twisted and the

carpetbag hooked into burningly cold fingers when she finally

staggered into a drug store. There was a pot-bellied stove with an

iron fence around it. Her flesh began to sing. She cupped her hands

against the warm, sheet-iron fence. All ten of her fingers, little

bells ringing. Tears of cold, that the wind had lashed to her

cheeks, started to thaw and run down. She began to fumble for her

handkerchief with the ten bells of fingers that would not stop

ringing.

The chemist, holding a measuring glass to the light and dripping into

it a colorless liquid from a large bottle, glanced up and shrugged

softly in his seersucker coat.

"Worst blizzard in ten years."

"Yah," she said, with her mouth full of the chattering dice of her

teeth.

"Where you going? You won't get a train out of this town to-day.

Worst tie-up in ten years."

"No. No. I got to go down to Front Street."

"Front Street? Docks, huh? You have as much chance getting down to

Front Street as a duck has of swimming through snowdrifts."

"I got to go," she said.

He looked at her over his glasses. He had a Yankee face with a

kick-up of beard.

"Where are you going, back to the old country?"

"Back? I've never been."

"Aint's you a Finn or something? You look as foreign to me as a

samovar. Got some foreign streaks in you, I'll wager."

"Many--but I don't know--all mixed--."

"Melting pot--eh? Well, it's a bad morning to have going anywhere on

your mind. Worst in ten years."

"I'm yoost changing places."

"Oh--housework?"

"Cook mostly."

"Whose firing a good, hefty girl like you on such a morning?"

"Not fired. I got references."

"Say, I have a customer over on Fifty-eighth Street needs a

cook--worst way! Small family. Good wages. I'm putting up these

aromatic spirits now for the old woman. You might take it over for

me and size up the place. Want the address--good folks?"

"If you will please be so good--."

He ran his tongue over a label, smacking it on to the bottle. "No

slip-ups on the way over. I'm taking a chance on you. My delivery

boy wouldn't miss the chance of staying away for a snowstorm like

this if he lived upstairs. Here's the name and address--."

She took the slip with her thick numbed fingers.

"Wall-en-stein--."

"Just around the corner. Tell them I sent you. He's the owner of

the Sample Shoe Store on Thirty-fourth Street."

She felt it incumbent upon her to purchase something, her eyes roving

along the shiny convex surface of a glass case. Rows of scented

toilet soaps shaped like the bodies of birds and made to cut softly

into the water. Perfumes. Bottle after bottle, the fragrance

throttled down with white membranous hoods. Sponges with gaping

thirsty little mouths. Things. Things that were sweet to the flesh.

Bertha had never owned of them.

"I'll have that," she said and pointed down into the case. It did

not matter.

"You don't want to buy anything," he said, and reached in for a cake

of the soap, slipping it into her hand. "I don't want you to take

something just to be polite. Have that on me. You're a nice girl.

They'll be lucky to get you. Wish I could afford you for the wife.

Don't forget the package."

She picked up her bag.

"Want to leave it here--in case--"

"Oh no," she said, "I don't mind," and curving her sore fingers again

about the handle, went out.

The wind met her with a swoop and a yell, standing her hat again up

on end. She bent into it, baring her teeth with the effort. The

elliptical shaped bar of soap was in her palm. It had pleasant

dimension. The smooth little blob of soap, shaped as an egg would

feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

***

The Wallensteins, where Bertha was to remain several years, lived on

the fifth floor. There were two middle-aged men in uniform in the

lower foyer, and pressed leatherette walls with grape-and-leaf design

embossed into them. What was really a small black onyx fountain in

the center of the lower hall was kept filled with artificial daisies,

and odds and ends belonging to the elevator men were surreptitiously

tucked under the cotton moss.

The Wallenstein living room overlooked the heads of the buildings

opposite and took in a fleeting view of Central Park with an etching

of tree, a pagoda on a rock, and a round of lake with a swan boat

floating upon it. A showy room of the shiny, overstuffed leather

furniture of the period. Velour hangings with tassels. A handsome

baby grand piano and a lamp with an openwork brass shade. Paintings

in shadow boxes and, incongruously enough, to fill in the narrow

panel of wall between the mantelpiece and door, a few Japanese prints

which Mr. Wallenstein had once been obliged to take over as part

payment of a bad account. Cool and thin with the fine calligraphy of

a minute and apparently emotionless art. Bare-legged coolies full of

little running steps. The span of many bridges. A plum tree,

botanically wrong. A peacock, ornithologically wrong. Slant faces

hung on like masks. Bertha liked to dust their impassiveness.

Evenings when there was not a poker party around the dining-room

table, the Wallensteins lounged about this room in loose unexcited

attitudes. Mr. Wallenstein reading the paper and yawning enormously

with protracted shudderings as he turned the pages. He was a tall,

heavy-set fellow, with very black hair parted down the center and set

on to his head squarely, like a toupee. His small, straight mustache

with the ends waxed up enhanced this squareness. When he stretched

out in his long hypothenuse and hoisted the newspaper, he littered

the entire center of the room, and to pass him, one had to climb.

Mrs. Wallenstein, on these evenings when there was no poker game,

uncorseted herself immediately after dinner, the soft white flesh

running down the hill of her body. She was very blonde, and wore her

hair in an elaborate tier upon tier of puffs. These puffs, made in

rows of three, four, and five, like hot buns, cluttered the house.

So much as open a drawer and one crawled out at you and wound itself

around your fingers in a webby, highly unpleasant fashion. Once Mr.

Wallenstein slid into a row of them that had somehow dropped into his

shoe, and forthwith had the noisy horrors.

Whenever old Mrs. Wallenstein found one, she picked it up gingerly,

as if it were a mouse by the tail, and handed it in a scathing kind

of silence to her daughter-in-law.

"Pfui!" was how she felt about most things pertaining to her son's

wife. But she sat, too, in the living room with the pair of them

after dinner. There was an arch of shadow where the lamplight did

not reach. Old Mrs. Wallenstein liked to sit back in that, idle and

brooding and with dry old eyes like prunes.

She had to have a hassock, because her feet did not touch the floor.

Young Mrs. Wallenstein had a way of kicking the hassock savagely when

her mother-in-law was not about, gritting her teeth with pain at her

stubbed toes and taking a fierce kind of delight in that pain, and

then kicking it again and again with her fancy tipped shoes.

Young Mrs. Wallenstein's shoes were eloquent. They were

short-vamped, florid, and after even one wearing apt to tipple a

little of run-over heels. Bertha was constantly at them with polish

and cleaning fluids and vaseline for the patent leather. There was

one pair of very high-heeled, slightly lop-sided champagne-colored

ones with black jigsaw trimming. Mrs. Wallenstein never failed with

her "pfui" when she passed them, smelling of cleaning fluid and

drying crookedly on the window sill. There was something suggestive

of blondely loose fat about their short vamps and run-over heels.

Old Mrs. Wallenstein wore square-toed, black bluchers with rubber

insets, which she polished herself every morning and set on the fire

escape outside Bertha's window to dry.

Her son, who was inclined to bunions, wore square toes too, but with

the additional flourish of spats with the green or ruby of vivid hose

above them.

Underneath the dining room table, their respective feet spoke

volumes. The polished orthodox ones of old Mrs. Wallenstein on their

hassock. The short-vamp, champagne ones. Wallenstein's rather

stolid ones between the two.

Difficult, nervous meals of three kinds of silences. An old lady's

aching one. A young woman's high-tensioned one. Wallenstein's tired

one.

Sometimes it seemed to Bertha that the dining room of golden oak and

swell of elaborate sideboard was filled with a gale of this silence,

like one of those terrific arctic windstorms that old sea dogs dread

because the water, in horrible phenomena, lies like glass under the

gale too wind-beaten to lift a wave.

"Pass me the butter, Wally." Scarcely the phraseology to rock

empires, and yet, when May Wallenstein said it, old Mrs. Wallenstein,

whose skin was sapless at best, could seem to shrivel into the

ancient parchment of the Torah.

She kept kosher. Valiantly. The forbidden combination of meat and

butter might desecrate her daughter-in-law's board, but not the

spirit nor the palate of the old lady. At her end of the table the

sacred rituals of the "_fleischig_" and "_milchig_" remained

unviolated. There was a shelf in the kitchen, especially contrived

by her son, for the kosher utensils and a two-burner gas-stove in the

corner for the personal and private preparation of her orthodox foods.

May hated that stove and the little whisper of garlic that hung above

it.

"Makes me sick to my stummick to walk into my own kitchen" was her

frequent _sotto voce_. "I'm Episcopalian, but I'd like to see myself

frying myself Episcopalian pork chops. Good to their stummicks! Oh,

Lord! Kosher is another word for stummick-love."

And Bertha, hearing, would clatter pans and turn on the spigot for

the plunge of water into the sink, because sometimes the undertones

percolated to the old woman's dim ears and then she had one of her

smothering spells and spirits of ammonia had to be administered. On

one occasion, Mr. Wallenstein, in the midst of a Monday marked-down

sale of Oxford-ties had to be sent for, and all through the rush

hours was obliged to sit alternating between holding his mother's

hand in her darkened bedroom and pacifying his wife, who invariably

expressed her frenzy by throwing articles of clothing into a

traveling bag and then strewing them all out again. It kept Bertha

on the jump, what with the hot water bag for the old lady's numb feet

and picking up the young one's distracted articles of finery.

"No. I won't be the one to go. Why should I? That's just what

she's laying for, to break up this house. But she won't! Not while

my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks!"

The last was a favorite aphorism of Mrs. Wallenstein. You could hear

it from the poker table:

"I'll raise you two bones. You can't bluff me. Not while my dress

buttons up the back with tiddlywinks." Or over the telephone to her

sister, who clerked in the Sample Shoe Store: "Tell Wally his mother

is fixing him one of his sweet-sour messes for his supper and to stop

by and bring me home a couple of chops for mine. I wouldn't eat

anything sweet and sour for no man. No siree, not while my dress

buttons up the back with tiddlywinks!"

A gay painted phrase like the little pagoda all lantern-hung in one

of the Japanese prints. Bertha liked it. Button up the back with

tiddlywinks! To be sure, May didn't button up that way at all, but

with much holding in at the waist and reddening of the face, and

exclamations like "Ouch, watch out, let me straighten my shields

first. A little elbow grease will help."

The fastenings were usually blobby velvet ones or hooks that strained

at their moorings.

To button up the back with tiddlywinks was to be gay as a striped

tent. It made Bertha feel gay somehow, just to repeat it to herself;

as gay as the day the river ran ahead of the furniture van to show

them the way to the grove.

But, generally, there was little enough to feel gay about at the

Wallensteins, with May and her tantrums so quick on the trigger, or

the broody old woman who on Friday evenings would light the candles

in her room and keep open her door so that the sound of her weeping

came in little bleatings down the hallway.

"She's putting on, putting on," May would sing-song, as she lolled

_en déshabillé_ in the living room. She had a perpetually hoarse

voice, full of fog. "When I feel like having a good cry, I go in my

room and shut the door, and God knows there's enough reasons around

here for having a good cry. Evening's diversion. God, how they love

to cry. It's a wonder there's not an Atlantic Ocean somewheres made

up of noisy kosher tears."

"I wish you'd leave my mother out of your gab, May."

"Oh, you do, do you? Well then, I wish she'd leave her gab out of my

business!"

"Between you and your rows you two women are driving me plumb raving

crazy. At least if I was the youngest I'd give in to an old

woman--like my mother with only a few years left to live. I'd humor

her, May. Honest I would."

"Few years. Long enough to have ruined my home for years! Few

years! With her digestion for the greasy meals she eats, she stands

a good chance of ruining it for many years to come."

"I won't stand hearing my mother talked about in language that's only

fit for a bar-room. This isn't the Bowery. It's supposed to be a

home where a man who's been on his feet all day can get a minute's

peace."

"What about me? Am I entitled to a little peace in my own home, too?

That old woman is driving me crazy. I can't get no friends to come

to the house no more the way she sits out in the next room yammering

to herself--I won't turn kosher for nobody's old woman. You married

me for what I was and my Episcopalian hide is as precious to me as

her kosher one! This isn't a home. It's a hell-house."

"May, you can't change a leopard's spots. My mother's old, and she's

grieving herself to death over things you're too young to understand.

She likes you, May."

"A lot I care if she likes me or not. Nobody could live in the house

with her. The dusting don't suit and the cooking don't suit and the

poker parties don't suit and the number of petticoats I have in the

wash don't suit. Bertha is the first servant we've ever been able to

keep in the same house with your mother and if that big lummox is

human I'll button my dress up the back with tiddlywinks...."

"She's the best servant we ever had."

"Yes, but nobody but a great, cream-colored elephant like her would

stand for the old woman's butting in. She's got a hide not even your

mother can break through. That's the way to be. Tough, so that they

can stick things in you and you don't feel 'em. I'm sensitive.

That's me. High-strung. I can't stand no yammering old hex in my

affairs, and not get the jimjams."

"You eat those words that you just called my mother."

"Eat 'em? I'll spit 'em out, you mean! Hex--that's what she is.

Hex!"

"By God--"

"All right, hit me! Hit me! Lots I care--go in there and cry some

kosher tears with her--I can't help it because your father died--I

can't help it because garlic makes me sick to my stummick--I can't

help it because a penny don't look the size of a sunrise to me--hit

me--hit me--but if you do, there'll be the greatest little smash-up

around here this happy home has ever known--hit me--I'd like to see

you try it, Sheenie!"

"By God--you--"

"Ah--ow--"

Then, to Bertha shuddering in the kitchen, the tormented frenzied

tumble of him down the hallway, the slam into his room and presently

the horrid distressed sounds of the violent sickness which these

scenes never failed to induce in him.

Silence, with May lying swollen and wet-mouthed on the couch, and the

bleating from the old woman's room whimpering down into sobs.

Virtually, it was Bertha who put the family to bed. Additional

blankets to be laid out. Pillows fluffed. The hot water bag for the

old woman's chilled spine. Ice for Wallenstein to suck. Spirits of

camphor for the threat of fever sore on May's swollen lips.

Yes, generally there was little enough to be glad about at the

Wallensteins.

***

In spring Bertha wheeled the old lady out in her rolling chair. She

had a hip-bone complaint and except in the house, seldom walked.

Bertha liked wheeling her out in the spring.

Usually because the up and down curbs were difficult, she trundled

her directly to the park.

There was a tree there beside the lake with the swan-boats on it,

that in April popped out in a delicate rash of leaves. It was down

eight steps hewn out of a natural rock, and sometimes old Mrs.

Wallenstein squealed at the tilt of the chair, but once down, there

was quite a little dell, and a bench beside the water so that when

one of the swan-boats moved the water ran up almost to the small

front wheels of the chair and then backed off again.

Long, sedative afternoons with the old woman droning into them and

Bertha, her hand joggling chair as if it were a perambulator,

watching the light bend around the lake. In repose the look of

tightness could seem to ease up in Mrs. Wallenstein's face like the

flesh of a prune that has been dropped in water.

Faces like hers, strong-skinned, high-boned, and the eyes a little

fanatical with love, had kept the storm-blown flames of the

seven-branch candlestick burning down through the ages.

When Mrs. Wallenstein wept for her son she wept for Israel, and that

is why her eyes could sometimes seem dry as salt beds with bitter

residuum.

Often, talking through the quiet afternoon, her lips would try to

shape themselves for words too heart-twisting for her to endure to

speak and so she would cry them, her mouth writhing back from the

gums.

"My boy. I don't care, Berthie, so much that she has stolen him from

me, every mother who loses a son to a wife must learn such pain, but

Berthie--she's stolen him from his faith--ain't that an awful pain,

Berthie, to have a son stolen like a baby from his cradle out of his

religion? Away from his God--to hers."

Here was that God business again. God--drenched in Light. Why was

Mrs. Wallenstein's God a better God than May's God? Why was not the

God who made May, the same God who made Mrs. Wallenstein and Bertha

and Mr. Musliner and--and Rollo and even Annie Wennerberg? All this

wrangling over your God and my God. God--drenched in Light. Or was

God Light? Then why this groping in the dark? Julie, the waitress,

had talked to her God along a string of beads. May Wallenstein went

out on saint days to visit hers. Mrs. Wallenstein burned candles and

kept her tongue free of the salt of swine in His name. One God and

yet all struggling over Him. Tearing Him to pieces and setting up

each his shred. Mrs. Wallenstein refuting May's Shred for her Shred.

Julie's Shred to be whispered to along a string of beads. Your

Shred. My Shred. Yet all torn off the divinely bleeding and

omnipotent form of God--drenched in Light. To sit in that Light and

soak it in through the pores--drowsily as the old woman talked--and

talked on--through the spring-lit afternoons.

"A boy who was raised in such a home like his should go out of it to

another religion! Not a Friday night in his life that he didn't see

his papa and me light the candles for our Shabbas. I'm afraid to

die. I'm afraid to die and leave him to face her God."

Silently then, Bertha would jounce the handle of the rolling chair.

"She's not right for him, Berthie. How I prayed with him that night

he came home from the dance-hall where he met her, he should not go

to such places--even before I knew where it would lead to. She ain't

a helpful wife, Berthie--like I was to mine. I stinted. She spends.

I mended and washed and ironed. She plays poker and eats all day,

chocolates. My boy works on his feet fifteen hours and she spends it

faster as he can earn it. He don't realize it yet--he's in love. It

ain't nice to say it--but he's in love just with her body--no man can

change his God for a woman's body--and have it last."

Talk--talk--talk--through the long sedative afternoons. Sometimes

Bertha dozed a little, coming up to consciousness for snatches of it

and then slipping off again, her head over toward one shoulder and

her hand automatically at the little sedative jouncing motion.

"You should have seen, Berthie--such a little new suit as his papa

bought him for _bar mitzvah_--to get _bar mitzvah_ by us is the holy

time when boy becomes a little man in his religion. His papa--how

every night after supper, in the back of the store so sometimes the

customers had to wait, my husband heard that child his _bar mitzvah_

lesson. And for what? Such a blonde shixsa what don't do nothing

except set him against his mother and his religion and throw out his

money for him faster as he can make it. Thank God his papa didn't

live to see it--maybe he blames me when we meet again--I couldn't

help it, Julius--I tried--I prayed--I tried--I prayed--she got him

with her white flesh, Julius--blonde flesh like he wasn't used to.

When a woman gets hold of a boy that way--ours--not even his

mother--or even his God, Julius--can hold him back--Julius--don't be

mad--I couldn't hold--him--back--he's a good boy--but I couldn't hold

him--back--"

And so on and on through the whimpering lips, until the copper band

of light around the lake snapped out and with a great pulling and

tugging and sometimes the help of a passerby, Bertha began to yank

the wheel chair up the steps that were hewn out of natural rock.

***

Bertha's second summer there Wallenstein and his wife took a two

weeks' holiday at a small lake resort upstate known as Becker's

Point. May's second brother ran what they called "the pickle boat"

around the lake in summer. A small provision tug which puffed about

all day, dispensing from landing to landing, the tinned, the tabloid,

and the compressed foods of the summer colony.

"You would rather have your vacation, Wally, by Fleishmans in the

Catskills where you're used to it, but lots she cares where you get

your vacation just so she gets hers. Her brother with his store on a

boat! We're plain but substantial people. In our family we got our

stores on streets like it is legitimate."

Wallenstein took his mother by the wrists and pressed his fingers

into them until white areas sprang.

"For God's sake, mama, don't start anything with May now. I do want

to go to Becker's Point. I need a rest. I'm nervous. Damnably

nervous."

"I won't say anything, Wally, to her if I bust with it. I'm only

saying it to you--I know how you like it at Fleishmans in the

Catskills--"

"I'll send you there, ma--Bertha can take you--"

"Me? For myself, Wally, I'm satisfied to stay home and do a little

saving. But that you should have to lay around such a _goy_ place!"

"Ma, if I hear that hateful word from you one more time! I'm worn

out--I can't stand it--I'm nervous--you hear--"

"All right, Son. Don't holler. Maybe I won't be here so much longer

you should holler at me like that--if only I wasn't afraid to die and

meet papa--"

He dropped to one knee, kissing her hand.

"Mama, mama, don't torment me. I love her, mama, and

I--sometimes--I--I'm afraid--I hate her! That's torment for

you--torment of hell on earth. To love a woman at the same time that

you hate her!"

***

So that summer for two weeks of an August that glared down upon the

city until it was as bleached and polished as old bone, Bertha and

Mrs. Wallenstein had the flat to themselves.

Hot, motionless days and nights that seemed to sit still and brood

like pyramids! For the time, Bertha slept on a cot at the foot of

the old woman's bed. She tossed a great deal and a little moan ran

through her light snores, and sometimes she started up with short,

sharp cries.

"Wally! Don't let her! Julius! It's _pesach_--Wally--don't eat

that bread! Shiksa! A shiksa wife! No, no, papa--I tried--I

begged. I prayed."

Often Bertha had to get up and turn on the light.

"You bane dreaming, Mrs. Wallenstein. See. It's Bertha. Here, let

me fix your pillows--take a sip of water--so--there's nobody here but

Bertha."

"I thought it was _pesach_, Bertha--when my people must eat only

_matzoths_--the unleavened bread of God--and she wouldn't let

me--Bertha."

"Shh-h-h, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"She stepped on them once," and up went the voice to the peak of

hysteria that was so hard to quell. "_Matzoths_. God's bread. I

can't ever forgive her that...."

And so on and so on and so on through the burning deserts of these

motionless August nights and sometimes, of sheer exhaustion, Bertha

slept. Vastly. With her cheek crumpled up against her arm, the

sheets thrown back from her body, and the great ridge of her

uncovered legs magnolia-white in the darkness.

One dawn a withered leaf fluttered down upon the heavy torpor of

Bertha. It was Mrs. Wallenstein's hand, plucking at her from across

the footboard of her bed.

"Berthie!"

"Oh--what--yes, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"Berthie, I been called home."

"Where?"

"I want to go, Berthie. It ain't long now before I won't be here no

more and before I go--I want to go back down there. It won't be so

hard I should have to face Julius if first I can only go home."

"Why, Mrs. Wallenstein, you bane home--here."

"Here is not home for me. Get me my foulard dress and my bonnet.

Quick! I want we should start before the heat of the day."

"But your son will not like it."

A sudden slyness came curling out in the old woman's face.

"No, he don't like it if I go, Berthie. It ain't stylish that his

old mother should remember old days, but Berthie, please, take me

home. I want more as anything to go. Only down by Division Street,

Berthie?"

"Mrs. Wallenstein--you can't walk--"

"Look, Berthie--when I got ambition, see how I can walk--see,

Berthie--please--"

And sure enough, she began to limp about, outlandish in her

nightdress, with the rack of her old body shaking through, but her

face thrust out ahead of herself, like a lantern.

"Mrs. Wallenstein--your son--I promised to take good care--"

She was slyer and slyer, her eyebrows running up into little peaks

and her cheek bones and chin jutting out into points.

"He don't got to know, Berthie. Take me home, Berthie, before I die.

I'm going to die--soon. I hear it at nights underneath my sleep.

And you know what it is, Berthie, to hear things--that way. Because

always you too are listening to something. I heard it again last

night--take me home, Berthie, so I can get strength back to meet

papa---I want my old home where we lived twenty years and where my

boy learned his _bar mitzvah_ lessons behind the counter--I want to

go back--"

And Bertha washed the old face of its tear traces, brushed back the

old hair into thin streaks that scarcely covered the scalp, and

fastened around her the decent silk foulard dress.

The August day came out at them like a parched and coated tongue as

they started for Division Street.

The wheels ran and banged, and a breeze that smelled of armpits and

little babies, milk-soaked bibs and bedding that had been sweated

into, blew through the street car. A breeze as curiously alive as

breath.

It stood the little invisible nap of fine hairs on Bertha's forearm

up on end in an electric little rash and it rushed against her ears,

thick with words that could not form themselves out of the two dozen

languages that the East Side exuded. A conglomerate breath, rich in

nationalities and that would one day find voice. Bertha knew that

rich kind of muteness. It beat up against her so.

At Canal Street it was as if the sidewalks ran shouting to meet them.

It was hard to steady Mrs. Wallenstein against the dizzying swirl,

because she was crying and through the dimness of tears wading her

way eastward, her umbrella, which she carried as a steadying cane,

waving out before her as if to clear the way of children and languid

puffs of dirty newspaper and rinds and rinds of fruits.

"Ten years since I been home, Berthie. How I worked when I was a

young woman down here to get ourselves out of it and now I got myself

out of it how I eat my heart to be back in it. My boy was _bar

mitzvah_ down here. My husband made us a living down here. My

happiest days in my life I spent down here with my people. Hurry,

Berthie. I want to get home. It's two blocks only now. I want you

should see where my baby was born--"

Old Mrs. Wallenstein. Suddenly full of young little running

steps--two long raspberry ovals of color out in her cheeks, the

foulard dress ballooning as she hurried. Tears. Tears. Tears.

Thick lenses of them.

***

The house in Division Street was as lean as a witch. Human bodies,

lax, like pillows over sills, dangling and shouting from windows.

That dingy and perpetual banner of poverty, the family wash line,

kicking and writhing. There was a poultry store on the ground floor.

Strong smells of chicken blood and hot fuzz, and on the high stoop,

like a brooding conclave of the shawled women of the east, half a

dozen old crones in white headkerchiefs and burning back deeply in

them--deeply, burningly back, tired Old-Testament eyes.

Suddenly Mrs. Wallenstein's legs gave out under her. They would not

climb that stoop. Twice, with Bertha's sturdy hand at her elbow, she

raised her foot for the first step and twice her knees doubled under,

until finally she crumpled up on the first step, leaning her face

against the railing to cry.

"I can't go no further. I'm too happy. I'm home. This is my stoop.

I don't know no more these faces, but this is my stoop."

And the snow of hot fuzz blew against her lips, and children, filthy

with the fruit-rinds of the littered streets, gathered around, and

the biblical old women with their peering faces and dead-leaf hands

came down the steps, and Mrs. Wallenstein, laughing and crying, held

out her arms to them and they drew back shyly.

Then came an avalanche of words. Words. A torrent of them that were

new and alien to Bertha. Words that she had never heard before.

Down off the chute of Mrs. Wallenstein's tongue they came, tumbling

in Yiddish. Coals off a chute. Clatter. Clatter. And the circle

of the old women closed in, and off ran the children, uninterested in

just another conclave of the elders. And the sun grew hotter and

higher and the din ground itself against the flesh like grime, and

Bertha sat by waiting, while the whining voices of the old women, in

a circle now on the lowermost step, wove on and on.

The heat was like a boil, gathering and throbbing into the head of

high noon, and still the children shouted and the bodies that hung

across window sills pointed and shrieked down to them. Pushcarts

began to leak of their softening and rotting fruits; old men dozed

into their beards; cats slept in the attitude of death, but with

palpitating sides. A tailor sat on his ironing board reading the

newspaper in which his half-eaten herring sandwich was wrapped, and

played up and down on his small pocket piccolo, the thin grieving

notes of the desert.

Oi--oi--the high quail voices of the old women--the dry old women

past childbearing and with the dry eyes and the dry breasts and the

dry tears.

Bertha began to walk. Banners waved. The banners of the flying

gibbets of leggy underwear from high clothes lines. The jargon of

Yiddish ran in a tide. More and more old women on hot high stoops.

The life of the children close down to sidewalks with the rinds and

the drip from the fruit carts.

Then suddenly Prince Street, little Italy, the women with the pot

bellies of more and more child bearing, the men debonair with the

blackness of hair and the whiteness of teeth. Curving scimitar of

Chinese Pell Street, the shape of a mandarin's little-finger nail;

skins the color of apricots. Much further down ran Front Street with

its flotsam from the sea and still further down, West Street of the

water pipe and fez. Hot, disturbed breaths of alien climes, not

soluble one in another, but all soluble in the new world. And out of

the new world was one day to come the rich composite expression that

struggled so for articulation.

The words of the jeweled sands.

***

The day was on the down side. Through the heat dance all the lean

houses seemed to have wavy walls, and it was not easy to manipulate

Mrs. Wallenstein back again to the street car. They had to let two

of them pass because again the old woman could not quite bring her

foot to raise for the step, but finally she made the hoist and

plumped down inside with a burst of perspiration.

Except for the sighs which blew and blew off the twisted old crags of

lips, she seemed to doze, with her fist plunged deep into Bertha's

palm and throbbing there.

"You seen, Berthie--my people--those are my people--and his--our

people. Berthie--who are your people?"

"My people?" She looked at her softly, the wide lips falling apart to

smile. "My people? Why those are my people," she said, her eyes

very blue and her lips fumbling to say more. "Those are my people.

Out there. All. Everywhere."

***

It was the last time the old woman ever left the house. August

roared on and Wallenstein and his wife returned. Bertha moved her

cot back into the breathless room that opened off the kitchen, and

the old woman resumed her long, motionless watches in the shadowy

arch between the folding doors. Sitting there during the long

merriments of the poker game, her dry eyes forever focused upon her

son, they could seem to smear into a single tearless and reproachful

orb in the center of her forehead.

"Gives me the jimjams--her sitting back there--" was another frequent

_sotto voce_ of May, her white flesh writhing up and down under the

large pearls and transparent chiffons she was fond of wearing.

"Mama dear, don't you think you had better let Bertha take you to

bed--we're going to play a round of rudles yet and you must be tired."

"I'm all right, son."

Once a guest, a Mr. McGuire, who was a frequent visitor, swung around

in his chair to her.

"Come on, Grandma, have one of these kosher ham sandwiches. They're

kosher, ain't they, Wally--."

Oh. Oh. Oh. The poor dried prunes of eyes in Mrs. Wallenstein's

head. They seemed to have died there.

***

One January noon when there were pork chops snapping on the stove for

lunch, Mrs. Wallenstein was suddenly missing from her rocking chair

beside the window in her room. She left there less and less now, and

never without the hoist of Bertha's arm.

"Mrs. Wallenstein--the old woman--she's not in her room. I can't

find her."

May was drying her hair in a great fan that spread in a patch of cold

sunlight on the window sill.

"She's not far. No such luck."

Sure enough, Bertha finally discovered her shivering and crying on

the fire escape, where she had climbed with an agility that frenzy

alone could have given her.

"Mrs. Wallenstein, you must come in from the cold."

"Let her stay out there, Bertha. She'll soon get enough of it, if

she sees she can't spite me by one of her loony fits."

"Quick--come in right away. That is not nice to sit in the cold."

"I can't stand it. She should cut out my heart to get rid of me, but

I can't stand it I should have to spend my days in such a household

where my son's home is made every minute an insult to his religion.

It's like my own heart was frying with them pork chops. Thank God

his papa didn't live to see it."

Bertha coaxed her in, dragging her a chair for the step from sill to

floor, and full of little urgings.

"There. Now. So."

"It would be better, Berthie, if I die to-morrow. Then I don't stand

any more in my son's way or in my daughter-in-law's."

"No, no, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"It's not good, Berthie, a woman should got to stand between such a

good son's happiness with his wife like I do. Only, Berthie, she

ain't his happiness--he don't know it--but I do. A man who has to

pay with his God for his love don't find no happiness. My poor

son--he don't know which he should be first. My son or her husband.

I'm in the way, Berthie. Nobody knows it better as I do. Berthie

... never leave me, Berthie...."

She needed Bertha so. Even the absurd fashion in which she

pronounced her name was like a cry in the dark. A little winged sob

that could beat its way and nest in Bertha's heart and hurt there.

Sometimes at night, long after the lights were out, the cry would

come through to her, and down she would tiptoe and curl up at the

foot of the old woman's bed, ponderous as a mastiff.

Wallenstein was grateful. He had her come down to his shoe store on

Thirty-fourth Street to be fitted for two fine strong pairs of

bluchers, and as she went out with the package under her arm, he said:

"Never leave my mother, Bertha, and you won't regret it. She's a

little peculiar in her ways and her ways aren't my wife's ways--but a

better woman doesn't breathe--never leave her, Bertha."

"Yah--sure--never--"

Poor Wally. It was as if a wire cage had curved itself somehow about

him, with the egress woven cunningly into the mesh. He was in and

the two women with him, making a prison of what, with either of them

alone, might have been a nest.

Bertha felt, dumbly, fiercely, the relentless pattern of that mesh,

the angry tortured eyes of the three of them looking out. She wanted

to reach and to fold them all to her understanding. Even May.

Constantly, as that winter dragged through, there were half moons in

May's hand where the finger nails bit in.

"She-devil" was an expletive which smoked constantly on her lips.

She said it with her pinkly pointed finger nails cutting up into her

palms and her toes piling and her teeth grating. "She devil."

One day she ran from the luncheon table into the clothes closet in

her bedroom. It was horrible. Because she bit at the empty sleeves

of gowns hanging there, tore fabrics, jerked hangers from their

hooks, trampled on Wally's dressing gown, kicked until she bruised

her shoes and toes against the wall, and finally half collapsed in a

hurricane of the garments she had pulled down about herself. "She

devil. Old Hag. Matzoth face. Can't stand it. Sheenies. Both.

Stingy-gut. She-devil."

It happened trivially. Something like this. About noon a fog had

descended over the city. One of those gray smothers that roll in off

the sea. There was something extremely cozy about the indoors on a

day like this. Bertha prepared tea and fluffed up an egg omelette

with a fusty sense of that warm indoor coziness.

May had been stacking chips for a poker party that night. She was

playing practically every afternoon now, losing large sums which were

the subject of heated controversy with Wally, and five evenings out

of the week there were games at the house, too.

This day she wore a pink flannel wrapper and her hair was in curl

rags that rose off her temples like a shriek. She had a headache,

too.

"Got it too good," was the old woman's under-her-breath diagnosis of

the almost daily ritual of cold compress or headache powder.

"Yeh--swell chance for any one to have it good with a tightwad like

you in the house." Also _sotto voce_.

Oftentimes Bertha, hearing, would sicken with a sense of futility

that made almost the lifting of a pan from the stove too nerve

hurting to be endured.

Lunch was a meal to dread with the two women alone, and without the

intermediary influence of Wallenstein.

When May in the pink flannel wrapper entered the fog-swimming dining

room, she switched on the lights, seven high-power ones in the

colored glass dome over the table.

"Give me a tablet in a glass of water first, Bertha. My head's

splitting."

Then old Mrs. Wallenstein came in, stiffly in her black percale house

dress shotted with white four-leaf clovers, and carrying a bowl of

thick black lentil soup which she had warmed from a specially

prepared crock of it which she kept on the window sill.

"Say, May, since when has Wally got a stand-in with the electric

light company? If I can find my mouth in the middle of the day, you

should find yours with your younger eyes."

With a good humor which she valiantly tried to simulate for the trial

of these noonday meals together, the old woman clicked out the lights

again, just as May gulped down the headache tablet. The almost

reflex action of a woman who for a period of thirty thrifty years had

run her own home; and with that same reflex of a woman bound in turn

to run hers, May, the fuzz of fog in a whirlpool of anger about her,

sprang to the wall, clicking the lights back again.

"You dare," she cried with her lips lifting back drily off her teeth,

"you dare to dictate to me when I can have light in my own house and

when I can't!"

The old woman had a way of appearing to shrivel and to yellow under

the lash of her daughter-in-law's tongue. She seemed to recede to a

point.

"Is that the way, May, a daughter-in-law should talk to her husband's

mother, nearly three times her age, and who didn't mean nothing but a

little economy?"

"Economy my hind-foot! I'd like to see you or anybody like you tell

me when I can have the electric light on in my house and when I

can't. Not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks."

"Maybe, May, if you didn't know everything for yourself so well and

would let an old woman three times your age help----"

"Not you. You can't tell me nothing I don't know already."

"I can tell you that a good dutiful wife don't squander her husband's

money away on gambling debts and matinees--"

"You keep your gab out of my affairs. You've done enough damage in

this house as it is. My husband is my business."

"Your husband is my son!"

"More's the pity."

The shuddering, sucky, ligament-twisting cry of the mothers of sons

bearing them. That was the kind of moaning noise Mrs. Wallenstein

made as she went down into a little huddle on a dining-room chair.

"Mrs. Wallenstein!"

"Let 'er alone, Bertha. I'm used to those bluffs. I've seen her

topple over into those fake faints for years now. Temper, that's

all. She's tough as tripe."

"Oh God, why don't I die."

"Mrs. Wally--she bane old----"

"Let her alone, Bertha, I said. Hands off. That's the trouble now.

Her out there in the kitchen with you all day crying for sympathy.

It's a good thing you're built like a rock-of-ages, with her on your

neck all day or she'd have driven you away long ago, the way she did

every other servant we ever had. I'm sick of it, I am. Wally's got

to decide between her and me and pretty damn quick, too. I wish to

God I could go off somewhere and live in one room and never have to

clap eyes on the whole shebang again. He'll have to settle good and

heavy on me too--mind you that. _Matzoth house_, that's what I call

this. Well, thank God, I wasn't raised no matzoth eater."

"Belittle me. Belittle even my boy ... the finest son a mother ever

could be proud of--but don't make little my religion--don't make

little my God because he is not your God."

"God! Who said anything about your God. Matzoth is what I said, and

I say it again. _Matzoth house_. Two stoves. Two sets of dishes.

Matzoth crumbs all over the house so I have to be ashamed to have

company at my own table for matzoth. Matzoth. He likes 'em

too--dips 'em in coffee. Once a matzoth dunker always a matzoth

dunker. Can't change a leopard's spots. Matzoth is what I said.

You hear! _Matzoth house!_"

"Julius, my husband! Wally, my son! I can't keep it shut up in me

no more. I can't live here no more. To have to see, with every hour

I live, everything what is sacred to me and to mine, made little.

Papa, where are you up there--let me come to you. I'm alone--down

here, and I'm afraid to leave Wally--alone--with no God--help me,

Julius--help----"

May swung heavily into her chair.

"Well," she said, flopping the omelette which was cold by now to her

plate and jabbing into it with her fork, "here is where I am let in

for another pleasant lunch hour. It's a wonder I don't croak of

_kosher_ indigestion."

"I can't hear that word no more so abused! It's like salt in a sore.

Oh--oh--oh--if not for my son, I would right away pack my things--why

did he pull me up away from my people down there--these ways ain't my

ways--those are my people--he should let me go back."

"Well, no insin-uations, but you can take it from me if he didn't

always have you nagging him over to your ways, I could make him a

darn sight happier than he's ever been in his life before. He'd be a

live one, that son of yours--if he dared."

"That just goes to show! A woman with her thoughts on her home and

her husband's interests and--and children--don't got time for such

shennanigan talk like her husband should be a--a live one."

"You're going to ram that children talk down my throat once too

often. I'll have children when I get good and ready to have children

and not before."

"A woman shouldn't put her time for it, before God's time for it."

"If--if you weren't his mother and--old--I'd drive you out of the

house for less than that."

"Why don't you? It would make it easier than I should walk out from

my son's house on my own----"

"Well then--I do! You can't stay here day after day to devil the

life and soul out of me. I won't stand it. I--now--you--go--!"

"God, papa--God--Wally--no--no--it ain't possible I should live to

see it--out from my own son's home----"

"Yes--yes--out of your own son's home--driven out by the devil in

you--yes--yes----"

"Oh, Mrs. Wally--she bane old--oh--oh--oh, Mrs. Wally----"

"And you! Square Head, you! Lummox! There's something about you

gives me the jimjams. For all I know you're one of those still ones

that run deep. How do I know you're not taking sides with the old

woman and running to my husband with lies! Go--the two of you--the

quicker the better--go--go--go--"

It was then, because the words in her throat were a mere strangle and

her hands were curved and spread out like claws, that May ran

screaming to the clothes-closet, dragging down the garments in their

avalanche of fury down about her and gasping, choking, spluttering:

"She devil! Matzoth God! She devil!"

***

Toward dusk Bertha began to try to feed the old woman soup out of a

spoon that clicked against the square, porcelain teeth that were

twenty years too young for the gums.

"Can't swallow. Leave me alone, Berthie. I'm an old woman put out

from my own son's house. Where shall I go, Berthie? No. No. I

won't go. Nobody can drive me out from my son who needs me and who

has lost his God."

Forcing the spoon against the glassy teeth a sense of the race

indomitability of this old woman smote Bertha. Exactly as she had

recognized the Polish national anthem with her heart, so Bertha knew

this. There was no suppressing the mother of Wallenstein. Oppress

her, yes, but the light of the children of Israel was like a camp

fire in her eyes and would not be ground out.

It was bitter to stay, and the lips of the mother of Wallenstein were

twisted with that bitterness.

"The reason, Berthie, why nothing is so wonderful in a woman's life

as to have children, is because even to suffer for them--to suffer

for them is a blessing."

"To suffer--for--them----"

"But I don't wish it to no woman she should have such a knife in her

heart like mine. Death is not the only way to lose a child. You

should thank God, Berthie, you don't know what it is to give up a son

of your own heart's blood----"

"Not know what it is----"

The brook of the frozen tears, she could feel them thawing and

rushing up against her throat. Bertha who so seldom cried. She

tried to hold them back, tensing her tonsils into a dam against them.

"Take the soup away--Berthie--I can't take it--you're spilling it on

the sheet----"

How they pained, the pressing gorging tears. She was blind with

them, and when she swallowed them down with her great strength, they

ran back upon themselves and filled her with hurting torrents.

"Don't cry, Mrs. Wallenstein," she said finally, the words coming out

evenly over her own inner hemorrhage of tears.

"Two babies I lost to death, Berthie--but not even such suffering was

so bad as to lose a child to life."

"To--_give_--a--child--to--life, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"Hold me, Berthie, close--and say that over to me--over and over

again--to _give_--and not to lose--him----."

"To--give--a--child--to--life. To--give--a--child--to--life.

To--give----."

The old woman slept and finally there was dinner to be prepared and

it was Bertha's day for scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and

knees.

It was good, the great harsh drags across the splintery boards, pools

of soapy water smearing before the brush, her shoulders sweating.

Good, good, to sprawl for that reach under the sink, with her great

legs thrown out like those of a swimming frog's, and her heart

through the soft pad of breasts, beating down close where the tremors

were. The little vibratory tremors....

Great soapy circles. Pain that had dimension--pain the shape of her

arm sockets. Singing knees and the pleasant relief of lifting one

from the floor so that the sensation died down like suds.

Zeouw! Zeouw! This way and that, the water running a little after

the brush, and the smell that was almost a green one, coming up

between the boards. Water under her brush. She ground it in and in

and in, back into the soil from whence at some time or another it had

come and from whence it would come again.

At seven Wallenstein would come. There was dinner to be prepared. A

round of roast the shape of a cord of kindling wood. Gristle ran

through it. She cut it out as if it had been a nerve. A nasty

hurting thing. It was good to be able to slither it out and throw it

away in the tin pail under the sink.

Onions to peel. Tears. Light tears that seemed to leap from the

outside and lay against the eyes. Not the inner pushing ones that

tore the throat in their frenzy to get past. The smart ran up to her

nostrils. Good. Good. She could rub her nose, thick, white and

squatting and lawk, the smart was gone. Easy pain. The pull of her

arm sockets. Easy pain. But to be able to tear open her

throat--somehow--and get in at the torment there--the buried secret

torments that had not dimension....

Wallenstein would be home any minute now. Bertha had a sly little

procedure before dinner. It was to draw together two of the most

comfortable chairs in the living room, chummily, as if two women had

been sewing and gossiping there during the long quiet of an

afternoon. And Wallenstein liked the little first-hand attentions

that May, in prime mood, would give him. His slippers with the toes

out, standing waiting. A glass of orange juice on the table beside

their bed.

The look of strain and of drain would run out of his face when he

walked in on evidences of what might indicate that a day of rare

tranquillity had rolled over the household. He was quick at these

perceptions. An overturned hassock might mean that May's toe had

been stubbed in rage, or the sweetish thickness of an incense stick,

burning up into garlic fumes, warn of conflict before he had even

fitted his key into the lock.

Bertha was particularly careful about the two chairs. She dragged

them together and they squealed on their casters. They met his eye

directly he entered. May was stretched asleep on the sitting room

couch, her cheeks still wet and her lips, always with the sensuous

look of just having been kissed very hard, slightly, rather

appealingly, apart. One of her hands trailed to the floor and there

was a pale scatter of freckles on her arm, great isolated ones, so

large and far apart that Wallenstein could run his lips up it as if

it were a flute, kissing them one by one.

But when he finally did turn his key in the lock, it was as if May,

deeply simulating sleep, had been merely lying on the edge of it

waiting, so quickly she pounced at him, the castle of her yellow

puffs down over one ear and her right eye dragged upward from lying

on it.

"May! My dear----"

"Yah, 'dear'--you'd better 'dear' me--leaving me shut up here day

after day with a lunatic. Well, you don't need to go no further to

hear her side of the story with her lies, lies, lies! You can hear

it right here from me. Either that old woman gets out of this

house--here--now--to-night--or I go! As God is my witness--I'm

through!"

All the little wrinkles came running into his face like sand over

paper and he tried to take her in his arms.

"Oh no, you don't! Not this time. A few smooth words can't make up

for the all-day hell of living in this house. That old woman goes or

I go! I couldn't stand another day of it. You've been a long time

choosing, but you've got to chose now! I've tried. I've bit my

tongue in two trying. But I'm done."

"Why, May," he said in the sedative tone that must have worn a little

rut along his vocal cords from the repetition of it. "I know that

Ma's not easy, and there's not a day that I don't think of my girl at

home under conditions that aren't just right for her, but she's old,

May, and she means well and--and good God, May, a man's mother is a

man's mother, little eccentricities and all."

"No--no--we ain't going to argue any more, not while my dress buttons

up the back with tiddlywinks. I've been over it all till I'm as

crazy loony as she is. You got to decide. This time it's me or her.

One of us gets out!"

His nose was like a blade, the nostrils sort of drawn in by the

sharpness of his breath, and he stood under the hall light, growing

paler and paler as the fatigue lines deepened.

"May! you've never been like this! Has anything unusual happened?

My mother--how--where is she?"

"Oh no! Nothing unusual. Just the usual. That's the devil of it!

Just the usual, but the camel's back broke to-day. There's no

argument. There's just for you to decide which of us gets out." Her

body was bent backward in a curve and her head dangling, as if it

were a pale lantern weighing down the bamboo pole of her body.

He looked at her and at the shine of her flesh up at him through the

lace of her bodice and the old familiar trembling seized him, but he

dug with his nails into his palms and his words were all crowded

behind his teeth.

"Well then by God--you go!"

It was as if he had stabbed her in the up-thrust of bosom she could

always dazzle him with, because she threw out her arms and stood like

a great open fan, with the finery of her sleeve drapes falling to the

floor.

"Me!"

"You," he said, "yes--yes--you----"

"You don't mean that--Wally."

"I do," he said, still with the jam of words behind his teeth.

For the first time her body sort of unwound itself of its tight

theatricalism and she looked at him with her mouth shaped to cry out,

but it only quivered.

"If anybody goes out of this house, it's not going to be my mother.

Get that! I may be low--but not that low. She stays here!"

"You heard what I got to say," she said.

"Yes, I heard," he said, and looked at her steadily and without the

flicker of a muscle. "I heard."

There was a pause that was full of their breathing and then with a

lightning gesture she darted out for his hand, but he was too quick

for her.

"Wally!"

"No," he said, holding it behind him, "no, none of that."

She darted again and he looked at her coldly and smiled, holding

himself on a little oblique that eluded her.

"That don't go this time, May. I'm at the end of my rope here. You

have been called upon to make certain sacrifices. I know that. And

I don't say they have always been easy ones. But that's part of this

game of marriage. Learning to take the hurdles. You haven't taken

yours. There's no argument here. Between two women, one of them

young and able to take care of herself, and the other seventy years

old and--my mother--well, if it's a case of one of them having to go,

it's not going to be my mother! This is one of those deadlocks in

marriage where there is no solution. A woman either gives in or

she--don't. You don't!"

With his body thrust back from her, the words in her mouth were meal,

and she knew it and suddenly, with a sinuosity that was rare with

her, she had her arms about his knees and her cheek to him and her

sobs coming, so that even through the fabric of suiting her warm

breath reached him.

"Wally!"

He wrenched himself, but the vise of her arms was relentless, and so

with his head held up and his body still tense he stood taut, feeling

the tremor of her and finally the wet of her

tears--warm--warm--against his knee.

"Get up," he said, with his head back and his body away from her.

"Wally--Wally--for God's sake don't--don't throw me off for

her--Wally----."

"Off! Good God, what's a man to do--murder an old woman to get her

out of the way of a young one--God--God--what mess have I let myself

into! God--God--May--don't----."

"Wally"--her hands were up now against his waistcoat, so that the

shape of them burned through, and his face, which he kept averted,

was reddening, a slow red that ran down into his collar.

"You can't get me that--way--any--more----" he said, and caught her

two hands by the wrists and flung her backward, but she was too quick

for him again, and, as if from the momentum of the shove, she was

back again, with her arms about his neck, and her lips which were

shining with tears, straight and pat against his.

"No--No--May--none of that--no--I say--oh----"

Suddenly it was quiet, and when he lifted his head she was crouched

in a cradle his arms made for her and the tears were running heavily

down his cheeks.

"I'm tired," he said, crying frankly and daubing his eyes with the

back of her hand, "--dog tired" and sank down on a chair in the

hallway and she dragged up a stool, an outlandish one on the four

curved horns of a bull, and her arms were about his knees again and

her shining lips always close enough for him to feel the breath.

"You love me, Wally--I love you--what's the use--you can't give me

up----"

He beat his knees.

"God. God. Was ever a man in my plight? I can't give you up.

Well, where does that get me? I can't give her up, and the two of

you together are making my home a hell. I'm cursed _with_ you and

I'm cursed without you. God, God, was ever a man in such hell? I'll

be the one to get out--by God--I'll end it--I'll be the one to get

out----"

"Wally--Wally, that won't solve anything. That will bust it up for

all three. I've got a way out for us. Wally, it's the old woman. I

tell you she--she's got to go!"

"And, by God, I tell you, no! My mother doesn't pine out her days

alone in a rooming house----"

"No--no, Wally, you don't understand. Why I--you think I'd let her

pine out her days in a rooming house? The old woman's sick, Wally.

Her mind's sick. The old woman needs a hospital--a fine sunny big

hospital where they can take care of her----"

"My mother's not sick--she's--she's old--she's orthodox and she

believes so strong it makes her eccentric--she's not sick---."

"She is, Wally. Any doctor would say so. You don't see her all day

in the house like I do. You're making me live with a lunatic, Wally."

"You--take that back!"

"You don't know it. But I do. She sits all day talking to herself.

I'm afraid of her. I wouldn't ask you to throw her out, Wally. I'm

telling you she's got screws loose. She can get violent any time and

then you will have trouble. There's institutions. Fine sunny clean

ones. She ought to be committed. It's the only way, Wally---to save

her--and to save us. You want us to go to hell over a--a loon? Lots

of people go crazy on religion--the old woman, Wally--has screws

loose--it's against the law not to give her medical

treatment--there's plenty places, Wally--fine clean places where they

don't even know they're in that kind of a place where she can live in

peace and we can stay here in peace. Wally, are you going to throw

me over for a poor old woman that's lost her mind? I tell you she's

crazy, Wally. What'll you have out of it if I get out and leave you

here with a loon? You got to support me. No man can get away

without doing his duty to me. You got her and you got me any way you

look at it. If one of us got to go, the poor crazy old lady ought to

be the one. Get her in a--an--asy--a--hospital, Wally--and that'll

leave us here--in our home--together. Wally--poor, tired Wally--home

alone--here with his May."

His head fell down against the little cove of her shoulder and he

could feel her warm kisses through his hair, and finally when he

looked up with the stricken eyes of a St. Bernard dog, the tears ran

down over his words.

"I can't give you up, May. My poor mother--she's sick--she needs the

best of care--best--institution--she's sick--and she's

got--to--go----"

***

Tears. Tears. The dining room looked crazy through the blur of

them, and setting out the salt cellars and the vinegar cruet Bertha

could scarcely find the table. It waved up at her, Tilted. Ran in

little ripples that the tears made. Tears. Tears, The old woman----

She ran down the hall. It shot off in a little ell and on the slant

of wall was the door. The door that was between the old woman and

the knowing. The bitter knowing that must presently creep toward it

and under it like a terrible tide. She crashed through the door and

stood trembling in the center of the room.

The night light was burning and the old woman flew up in her vast

walnut bed with a cry.

"Wally--who? Ach, Berthie, how you frightened me. I must have been

dreaming. My Wally. My Julius--Berthie--it ain't nice you should

rush in so on me. You've made me a pain--here. What is it,

Berthie--nothing ain't wrong--Wally--home yet? Nothing ain't wrong?"

"Why--no--Mrs. Wallenstein--nothing--I yoost looked in a

minute--maybe you want something?"

"No--I--Berthie--you shouldn't rush in so--a pain here--from the

fright you gave me--such a pain--my heart--ach no--Berthie--I can't

lay down--it's a knife in me--you frightened me so--my heart----"

Her face was so little, and back in the frill of her cap a pointed

sort of receding look had set in, and she writhed up from the support

of Bertha's arm, against the pain of lying back on the pillows.

"My drops--quick, Berthie--my drops. I--you shouldn't have

frightened me--quick--my drops from the doctor."

There they stood, the little colorless phial of them on the table

beside the bed. Five of them. Bertha knew

how--drop-drop-drop-drop-drop--into a tumbler.

"Berthie--please----"

"No, Mrs. Wallenstein--no--yoost--lay still---- No, not any drops

this time--sleep--sh-h-h--no drops--sleep."

"I--my drops--pain--I--I'm so tired, Berthie--hold me--you frightened

me so--I was dreaming--my boy--she didn't get him--away from me--she

tried, Berthie--I dreamed--but she didn't--he wouldn't--my boy--he

stuck to his mama--she's old--she's in the way--but he stuck--why

don't you give me my drops, Berthie? I--he stuck by his mama,

Berthie----"

"Yes, Mrs. Wallenstein--he stuck----"

"I--I was never so tired--my drops--you should give me my

drops--dark--Berthie--yes, Julius--tired--he stuck--my boy--to his

mama--didn't he, Berthie?"

"Yes, Mrs. Wallenstein--yes----"

"--tired--my--drops. Wally--oh--God--ouch--oh--oh--ah----"

A sudden lurch forward in Bertha's arms, so that her torso rounded up

and left an arch of space between it and the bed.

It was hard to unbend it, because the body had stiffened, and with

her cheek to Mrs. Wallenstein's heart, Bertha pressed, pressed gently

until the little attitude of convulsion had straightened. It was so

quiet there with her cheek to Mrs. Wallenstein's dead heart.

***

A doctor folded the brittle hands. Little gulls skimming the old

breast. The preliminaries of death were set in motion. A soul had

been set free and mortals were solemn. Almost immediately the shades

somehow were down and there was a new odor. The odor of death.

May had gone out like a flame. Her face seemed suddenly very small

between the two enormous blobs of pearl earrings, and she had pinned

up the flowing sleeves so that she had the plucked, necky look of a

fine bird that had lost its feathers, revealing the long pores of

dingy flesh.

"Poor Wally. Poor Wally."

He looked at her through tear-scalded eyes that did not see her at

all.

"My mother--my poor little mother--gone without a word----"

"Lots of them go that way, Wally. My old woman died in her sleep----"

"God--God, what her poor little life must have been here alone in

this room--nights. Mama forgive me. Mama, forgive me."

"She was a good sleeper, Wally. I used to hear her snoring and

always tiptoe by the door. I was always careful not to wake her."

May, craven with death.

He looked at her with his eyes full up with misery, and kept

repeating over and over again his phrases--"Mama forgive me. Poor

little life. I knew what you suffered, mama. There wasn't an hour

of the day or night it wasn't over me. I did it. I did it. Mama,

mama forgive--why did you leave me----?"

"Wally, you've got your May. Poor, poor Wally, don't cry--ain't you

got your May?"

He kissed her wildly, his wet lips smearing over her cheeks and the

twisted, crazy look in his eyes.

"Help me--help me to bear my remorse. I used to snap her off. I

never had patience with her. We left her alone when we went to the

country--alone here--she might have died like a dog--she did die

alone--like a dog--alone----"

"No, Wally. No. Bertha was with her!"

"Bertha! Then why didn't she give my mother her drops? She let her

die like a dog. That's what the doctor asked--why didn't the person

in whose arms she died, give her the drops? Murderer--where is

she--get out--where is she--I want her to get out!"

And Bertha, carrying down through the gloom of the hallway the seven

branch candlestick for the foot of old lady Wallenstein's bed, stood

hearing, her face picked out in light above the pointing flames. A

white face, floating in shadow and shining out of the darkness that

poured around it.

A clear, prophetic face above the seven lights.

It was then, gazing upon her, that Wally turned on his wife and

struck her three times on the very cheek that his lips had smeared.

"Mama," he screamed, "forgive me," and smoking hot off his lips came

words that had long since lain dead like dried roseleaves in his

memory.

[Illustration: Hebrew text]

Then he turned around on May.

"You go," he said, with his fingers curling inward to form little

cages, "go--go--while God gives me strength not to kill you. My

mama--my God--my darling, heartbroken mama--you made me a traitor to

her--you--you--you! Go--go--or so help me God--if ever I see you

again--God strike me dead if I don't kill you."

"Wally--for God's sake--don't--don't! Let me loose. I'll go, Wally.

Leave me go, Wally--for God's sake. You hurt! I'll go--Wally."

After a while it was quiet in the house. There was still the little

frangipani scent of May in her room, where she had fussed about in

the hysteria of packing. It followed her trail along the hallway as

she backed down it in terror, her little valise, with a twist of lace

caught in the fastening, held out before her. Then the hall

door--and out.

Quiet. With the light from the seven candles burning against the

transom and out palely into the hall, and Wally silent in there hour

after hour, cramped up against the bedside of his dead.

At midnight the first Mourner sprang up. One of the Old Testament

women off the stoop in Division Street, and from behind the closed

door, when she slid in beside Wally, her cry went down like a rapier

into the heart of the silence. A cry that stuck there to the hilt.

Toward morning when the Mourner dozed in a rocker at the foot of the

old woman's bed, Wally, who had never moved from his crouch at the

headboard, sprang up suddenly, his hair torn down over his face, but

his eyes clear.

"Bertha," he called, and ran out to the hallway and into her room.

"Bertha--you--you knew! Bertha--you cook!

Bertha--Bertha--come--back--Bertha--I see it now--Bertha----"

At that moment, in a dawn that ran thinly along the edge of the

roofs, Bertha with her carpetbag hooked to her fingers was walking.

East. A wettish wind, the wind before the dawn, blew her all

forward. Her skirts. Some strands of her paling yellow hair and the

terribly dilapidated old rose on her hat.

There were no pedestrians. Not even milk carts yet. Only Bertha,

walking before the wind.

***

Annie Wennerberg was on her back. Tied in a knot there on a cot of a

rheumatism that made bulbs of her knuckles, and swelled up her legs

as if they had been great goatskin water bags.

It was horrid, coming out of the clear morning, to walk in on her,

tucked way back in the lurking room she shared with the Australian

sailor when he was in port.

An iron shutter from the warehouse next door blocked the window, so

that it was dark and the jet of gas burned in there all day and kept

the smells warm. A sickening, stinking room, with Annie knotted into

it as fast to its walls as a fungus.

And Annie in all her knots of pain, looked fat--a swollen fat that

was the color of the goatskin water bags.

There were several pillows in their dingy tickings stacked behind

Annie's back, and a gray blanket wrapped around her legs that were as

lifeless looking as an old bundle. Jocko slept up against them.

A child of about fourteen, with a three-cornered face and a

three-cornered shawl spanning her little shoulders that were held in

as if from the shivers, was spreading a thick paste along a bit of

cloth. Antiphlogistine.

Bertha knew. The poultices like those she had made for Annie when

she herself was a child! And the cry that met Bertha as she entered.

She knew that, too. A whinny.

"I'm sick as a dog--lying here nine weeks come next Monday. My

joints won't untie. Nobody to do a turn. You're a lunk or you'd

look in on a body year in and year out. Me that raised you and fed

you when your tongue might have been hanging out for want of a home.

Clean me up--Bertha. There's eight cots upstairs walking away with

themselves, and only this brat doing the work of 'em. There's a

fruit freighter of boys in to-morrow--clean me up--Bertha."

And so that morning, with her carpetbag and coat on a chair in the

kitchen, Bertha moved Annie out of the hot, unaired nest of her

blanket, rubbed her with a liniment the doctor from the clinic had

left, combed out the gray dribble of hair, and got her back somehow

into the knot that was easiest for her to lie in. Poor Annie cried

out at Bertha lifting her ever so gently from her huddle, and the

little girl's shoulders shivered narrower together, and Jocko let

himself be dragged along with the blanket sooner than uncurl out of

his warmth. Annie wanted gin terribly and screamed for it. Its acid

was what was burning in her joints, but at noon she finally fell

asleep, shuddering and groaning. That afternoon, on her hands and

knees, Bertha washed down two of the dirty flights of stairs, did the

unmentionable chores of slops and bedding, turned over a drunken

sailor on his cot, and washed open his grit-bound eyes.

For eleven months, while Annie slowly untwisted and the swelling went

down, Bertha scrubbed these floors, tended the twenty cots, and

helped countless drunken sailors to bed by pulling off their heavy

shoes and piling them, like great lolling sacks of potatoes,

underneath the thin gray blankets, sometimes hoisting them upstairs

by the armpits, with an occasional boost of her knee from the rear.

One boy died up there one night of delirium tremens. No one could

get hold of his arms to twist them behind him. Bertha did finally,

squatting on his head as if he were a fallen horse, while a sailor

sat on his feet and still another on his middle. He was a

Scandinavian with a thin blond beard and a neck as lovely as a

woman's. With his wrists tied together he lay back in Bertha's arms.

She held him across her lap, he kicking and plunging his shoulders

this way and that. It was horrible to feel his great body fling back

against her knees and the strange foreign words flying on flecks of

foam from his lips. She began to croon to him one of the Polish

melodies that she knew somehow with her heart. He turned his eyes to

her, and watching the little beating movement her throat made as she

sat singing there in the dirty gas light, began to grow quiet. She

unloosed his hands. Finally, when the ambulance came he was asleep,

with his cheek to her heart and one arm about her neck, like a child.

Dead.

Months of these fantastic, sailor-infested nights. Night after night

of brawl after brawl. The slapping of hands against the walls of the

narrow hallways from the lurching this way and that. Little yellow

seamen with eyes that could seem to hang in the darkness of those

halls long after they had passed through it. Slant gashes. The

squawks and cries of men bestial in their sleep or dreaming of thirst

and typhoon, mutiny and sudden death.

The lowing of steamers. Enormous cries, as if a strange breed of sea

cattle were swimming in with the tide.

Wide, impersonal nights that the sense of the nearness of the sea

could make seem vast and booming. And all these little men of every

clime groping in its enormous darkness, dreaming their puny bestial

dreams into it, cowing away from the stars, most of them, on their

bellies up there on Annie's cots, their lids granulated and their

breathing sour.

***

Chita, the little slavey, came every day. She was one of fourteen

children in a Minetta Lane tenement and she was as wiry as Jocko and

as quick upstairs and down. She never ran her errands but rode her

way, curled up in a little cocoon on the back of a truck and dodging

the driver's each crack of the whip. She could sidestep a blow from

Annie with one beautiful curve of her little body, and once she ran

up Bertha's great flank, for all the world like Jocko, and turned a

double somersault down off her shoulder.

In winter her hands bled from chapping and her little nose was horrid

and her eyes grew into great disks as her face became smaller under

the pinch of cold.

Bertha bought her a reefer and mittens at the Sailors' Supply Store

and hemmed her two muslin handkerchiefs, which she bunched into dirty

little wads, and immediately lost.

She was as incessant as a buzz. Quick, capering, noiseless on her

feet. Never actually ill, but always with the head colds and her

little arms so skinny that it hurt to see them strain to lift a pail.

This was little Chita who came, as that slow damp winter wore on, to

live in the big, dim shadow of Bertha. She was fourteen and Bertha,

who knew what the sailors could say in their bestial dreams, kept her

close.

It was not a cold year, only sullen and penetrating and full of soot.

Bertha and Chita were covered with it. It blew in on the plumes of

smoke off the harbor tugs. The furnace belched it out at them.

Chita's little face was like a feeble light behind her mask of this

soot and, looking in a straight line down her own nose, Bertha could

see the black marks, smeared along the flesh.

Sometimes the sailors sent Chita out for stogies or tobacco or beer.

She was greedy of the pennies and foreign coins they threw, sometimes

sucking them up under her tongue all day and holding her mouth grim

and tight when Bertha tried to pry in a finger to force them out.

A long winter that, more like a cloudy November dusk. Annie knotted

into her bed and looking out through the door of her room, which she

always kept open, upon the two of them moving so tirelessly upstairs

and down, at slops, scrubbing until the wet stench rose, and when a

fruit steamer or a freighter came in, running with the gray blankets

and the pillows.

Chita feared Annie and the vituperative words. She seemed to shrink

and the disks of her eyes to become larger. Annie's hands were too

crippled to strike her, but all the same she would quiver back, her

arm dodging up before her eyes, and the great bony bulbs of her knees

clicking together.

But in the shadow of Bertha it was safe. There she could play around

with Jocko, herself so curiously like Jocko, cheating on the job

outrageously. They would start, she and Bertha, at the opposite ends

of a floor, scrubbing toward the center, only Chita never arrived.

She liked to sit in a huddle and rock herself, arms locked about her

ankles and chitter--chitter questions at the great crawling hulk of

Bertha as she came scrubbing toward her on all fours, her arm

plunging from the socket and sweeping its great circle of dirty suds.

Darting, steely little questions that she threw like knives in

mumblety-peg, landing them straight up.

"Bertha, b'Jesus-- Whozee? Huh?"

"Jesus? He was a man, Chita."

"A man nawthin'! He's God."

"He bane a perfect man."

"Bloke, you! God wusn't a man. God, he had curls and a white dress."

"Yah--He--was drenched in Light--that was his white dress."

"Bloke, you! Light ain't no white dress. Silk is. That's you!"

said Chita and slid out with her palm a splash of greasy water from

her scrub pail upon Bertha--"that's you--drenched in slop."

Bertha boxed her then, roundly against the ear, so that the little

imp, strung on her wires of legs, jumped and dangled.

"You bane a--a bad rowdy--brat--."

"Bertha--drenched in--slop--."

She looked down to fleck off some webby stuff that had clung to her

gray woolen skirt.

"Slop cannot drench--like Light!"

"What light?"

"His!"

"Aw you--square head--there ain't no light."

"Aw you--curly head, there ain't unless you see it."

Sometimes Bertha kissed her, right down into the riot of short curls

that rose off her head like the suds of a shampoo.

But Chita was nervous and vicious from being afraid. Once she bit

Bertha on the lips until they bled.

"Bloke, you fooled me--diden you? Bloke you! I thought you wuz

gonna hit."

Chita had black and blue marks on her arms and down her lean little

legs. Usually when she came to work in the morning she could display

new ones. Not without pride.

"Me mudder give me this one. Me old man. Me brud! Look at 'em and

make a snoot, Bertha."

The sight of these blue and green bruises, burning there so sullenly

along the tan little limbs of Chita, could cause Bertha's lips to

fold back in a quivering ejaculation of sickness. That was a "snoot."

"I don't know any snoots, Chita."

"There, bloke you--you're doing one now--a snoot like there was

somebody sticking a knife and fork in you and then cutting you up in

little bittsa pieces----"

Chita was fond of the torturous phrase. She liked to devise them.

Her father's favorite threat to her was, "I'll brekka your leg."

"Bertha, what if somebody 'ud cut off Annie Wennerberg's head and

cook it with cabbage."

"Chita, you think only bad thoughts."

"Me brud stuck a pin in my wrist once, all the way in."

"Poor Chita."

"If I was a jackknife I'd cut all bad people's eyes out----"

"Poor Chita--it bane terrible bad for you with your people----"

"I'd slit a Chinaman if I had a butcher knife."

"Chita!"

"Looka, he gimme this--me old man--he pinched--look--make a snoot

now--look--ouch--don't touch."

It was a savage-looking black and blue mark on her shoulder, and one

day it began to fester and Chita, a little stoic for pain, started

whimpering and reaching up her lower lip to suck in the tears.

Squatting in their puddles, as they scrubbed toward one another down

one of the pitch-black upper halls, Bertha, who had grown bold in

words with this child, began to piece out a story to soothe her.

"Don't cry, Chita."

"Hurts. Hurts."

"Poor little Chita your tears are falling right in the

scrub-bucket----"

"I hurt so, Bertha----"

"Sh-h, don't cry, Chita. Once upon a time, there was a good little

girl like you----"

"Me?"

"Yah. She cried too, little Chita, because her wounds they hurt."

"Pinches, like mine."

"Yah, pinches."

"An' bloody sores--I got bloody sores, too----"

"And bloody sores----"

"And she lived by the ocean----"

"The Cunard piers?"

"No--no--out somewhere--old countree--a gray ocean--with rocks----"

"Old countree. Naples is old countree----"

"It was lonely by the ocean. Sometimes she cried much."

"No mudder--no brud?"

"Nobody. Only wind that tore her and rain that wet her and snow that

froze her."

"No bread? No spagett'?"

"Sometimes a fisherman out of a boat on the sea brought her fish----"

"A beau----"

"N-no--yoost--a man."

"Did he like 'er?"

"She--could--clean--fish----"

"Ugh!"

"But that was yoost ugly to her hands and she did not mind."

"Phew!"

"She used to cry--sometimes because it was so beautiful--the rocks

and the sea--or so lonely--the sky and the rocks and the sea--so

big--like she felt inside of-herself--big----"

"Big as--New York?"

"Yah--she used to cry--right out of her heart--into the waves--yoost

like you cry into the bucket--and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"Her tears got folded up in the water of the waves and one day a

little girl way off in New York----"

"Me?"

"Yah--took a drink of water and whadda you think was in the drink of

water?"

"A bug!"

"The tears--the beautiful tears that the lonely girl in old countree

had cried because the sea was so lonely and the sky and the rocks and

the sea--so big and--and heart-breaking and----"

"She drank 'em--the same tears----"

"Yah--and whadda you think?"

"What?"

"When she drank 'em--the little girl off in New York----"

"Me?"

"Yah--they began to boil inside of her----"

"How----"

"Just boil--and swell--like waves--and she was all full--of the sky

and rocks and the sea and the heart-break and whadda you think?"

"What? She busted!"

"She began to sing, Chit--the tears inside they were hurting--and she

began to sing--all the beauty of the sea and the sky and the rocks

and the--loneliness and the heart beauty--wasn't that grand,

Chita--and from all over the people came to hear her--the most

beautiful singing in the world all filled with the tears that were

shed by the sea----"

"Was that me----"

"Yah--I guess so and----"

"And the girl in the old countree?"

"Oh she--I dunno--she----"

"Didn't her beau----"

"Yah--her beau--the fisherman, I guess, came one day in the fishing

boat----"

"And was she glad?"

"Yah--all her tears--the beautiful tears--were gone and she went with

him then----"

"To clean--the fish?"

"To--clean--the fish."

"I'd rather be me--with all the people in the world coming to hear

me--than cleaning fish----"

"I dunno--Chita--I dunno----."

The upper hall was full of the black twilight and Chita in her puddle

had scarcely scrubbed her way forward at all. It was Bertha who had

come scouring down the hallway toward her. They met on all fours

there at one end of the gloom. Chita with her little bright eyes

shining in amber tunnels like Jocko's. The hulk of Bertha.

"Kiss me, Bertha."

"Oh Chita. Chita."

***

Something hateful happened. On Dearborn Street near Front was a

pretty brick house, conspicuous for its undilapidated shutters and

polished doorplate. Bertha passed it upon those rare occasions when

she walked out. It was next to a meat stall, where she went to buy

lamb-neck for stew. Annie's favorite dish. A small meticulous house

with something of the narrow-shouldered air of a lady missionary.

The little white ruching of front steps. The pious precisions. The

exactitude of window shades like eyelids discreetly lowered for

prayer. That polished doorplate! It has a habit of moving along

sedately before Bertha's eyes to the meat stall and back again.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Society for the

prevention of cruelty to children.

Chita's tan, taut little body with the blue spots running up her leg.

There was even one on her tiny, lovely breast. A lurid, frightening

purple. And Chita's eyelids were peculiarly red at the rims and her

feet inflamed looking, probably merely because she loved so to dance,

but her toes were all curled under, in a prehensile fashion.

Bertha liked to rub them warm, until the blood circulated, and to

anoint the bruises with the many different liniments she was lavish

at buying. And the reefer! To unbutton it from its warm fastenings

when Chita arrived in the morning and to button it up snugly in

double-breasted fashion when Chita went home at night! Sometimes as

it hung on its peg all day Bertha would button it there, and then

unfasten it again. Chita's little reefer. Chita.

So resolutely, she kept her head away from that small polished sign.

But even so, it was screwed to her eyes. "Society for the Prevention

of Cruelty to Children." She scrubbed floors through it, she stirred

stew of veal through it. She saw Chita through it. She shook open a

gray blanket to make up a sailor's cot, and there it stared up at

her. Society-for-the-Pre-vention-of-Cruelty-to-Children.

Then the something hateful happened.

There were three freighters in and the men were sleeping two on a

cot, and floor pallets were to be made up, and all morning Bertha had

been hoisting mattresses up the narrow stairway, even Annie, who

could walk a little now, hobbling as far as the foot of the steps

with an armful of pillows. Chita was like Jocko and Jocko like

Chita. They scampered over banisters. Slid downstairs and rode up

on Bertha's shoulder. Only with Annie about, one had to be very

spry, and by noon Chita had made sixteen cots and filled all the wash

pitchers. Usually Bertha filled these for her, but Annie's eyes

seemed to have the power of turning the corner of the upper halls, so

Chita lugged and tugged alone and her breath came very short, and the

red rims around her eyes seemed almost wet with blood.

The men began to swagger in on sea legs. Rum. The smell of it

ticklingly through the hallways. Annie back in the keg room now,

whacking her knees with the best of them.

"Chita--you bane tired, poor baby. You can rest now. I will do it

for you."

"They hurt," said Chita and rubbing her arms began to cry. She never

cried to Annie.

Bertha rubbed them, the little bony fragile things, and blew on them

with her strong, hot breath. The room was in appalling disorder, the

sprawling cots, the mounds of mattresses, the dirty waters of

yesterday gathering scum in bowls. Thirty cots to be made and

already the seamen, lurching as if the world were a deck beneath

them, were sprawling in, loony with land.

One came in on her tussling with her man's task of getting mattresses

laid, a Scandinavian whom she knew by the name of Tor. He was one of

the troublesome ones, and he swung his arms around her waist, and she

shoved him from her with a force that sent him backward, down on one

of the half unfurled mattresses, and almost immediately he was asleep

and she dragged him to a corner, and there he lay for twenty-two

hours, like a dog, snoring.

And then suddenly, while she was dragging these mattresses into

place, Bertha missed Chita. Chita who danced so nimbly in her shadow

all day and ran up her shoulder like Jocko.

"Chita," she cried, and j'erked the pillows this way and that as if

she might have been a kitten, hiding. "Chita!"

There should have been nothing frightening about Chita bounding off

that way. But suddenly the silence seemed to have a little pulse to

it. It beat in Bertha's throat. And so she ran about the long

ward-like room, peering under pillows and mattresses for all the

world as if she were looking for the kitten.

"Chita!"

In the hallways was the hot pulsing silence too, except down in the

keg room there was laughter; crazy, skating laughter.

"Chita!"

There was a closet at the end of the hall, almost as large as a room

and with a skylight. It was filled with such miscellaneous old

refuse as a broken chair, leaky pails, the Australian sailor's

lambswool jacket, bottles, brooms, and a rusty gas stove.

Somehow, the door to this closet seemed to blow out at Bertha like a

woman's skirt. She opened it. There were Chita and a young Italian

sailor off a fruit ship. He had a face like a carved almond.

Narrow. Slit. White. And his fingers were quick and caressing over

Chita's little body, as if she had been a harp, and there she lay

back in his arms, her eyes, usually as quick as Jocko's, suddenly

like fresh and flowing waters that had been dammed. Stagnant and a

little heavy with mud. Chita lying back there, drugged-looking and

with her agile young limbs tranced. Chita--Chita lying back there

with her stagnant-looking eyes and her dancing limbs that were

suddenly full of a dreadful kind of languor.

The sailor oozed away. Literally. Because under Bertha's very eyes,

he was gone, leaving Chita on the chair like a doll that had been

cast there, along with other broken things.

"Chita----"

She began to whimper and dodge back.

"Diden do nawthin'----"

"Come here--to Bertha----"

"You can't hit me--you're not me mudder."

"Bertha won't hit you, Baby. Chita--come--to me----"

But Chita was still afraid, and it was almost like luring Jocko, to

unlock her tight fingers from the chair arm, and draw her out of her

tight crouch in the corner.

"I diden do nawthin'--lemme alone."

"Chita--little Chita."

It was dead in the old closet. Stale smelling. For an hour Bertha

held Chita there, in her big, man-sized arms. Close. Pressing her

little boniness against her breast, while the beat of her heart

pounded through.

Below the men were swaggering in now, outlandish with their packs and

bags of luggage, and downstairs Annie's voice, shouting for Bertha

and shouting for Chita, kept screaming out oaths between greetings.

"Bertha--was I almost being bad----"

"Yes, Chita. Terribly. Terribly bad."

"I won't no more, Bertha. My Bertha. You're cryin'----"

"For you, Chita."

"No, Bertha, I'm gonna be good--Bertha--what's that on your insides?

A heart--it's ticking--like a clock."

"For you, Chita."

"Tick--Bertha--for me----"

She fell asleep, and finally Annie's oaths died down in the

hullabaloo of arrivals, and the great empty barracks of a room with

the unmade cots and the half-furled mattresses stood waiting, and the

skylight over the closet turned taupe, and down in the keg room the

shoutings rose and somebody must have overturned a tray of glasses

because a crash splintered the silence and, under cover of it, Bertha

shook Chita gently awake and buttoned her into her reefer. It was

dusk and she walked home with her down to the mouth of a filthy

street on the lower West Side.

"Good night, Bertha--my--Bertha----"

"Good night--Chita--mine----"

She watched her scamper down the street, nimble once more as Jocko,

and up into the black mouth of a tenement.

The way back was through a district of torchlit pushcarts and the

flicker of pale wastrel faces. There was a waving light before the

meat stall. The meticulous little house with the narrow shoulders of

a lady missionary stood out of the glare. Neatly. The shutters were

closed, but there was a fan of lit transom above the door.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Ringing the bell above that small sign, a tear meandered down to the

corner of Bertha's lips.

***

It was noon of the next day when they came to take Chita. She was

washing the iron grating of a ground-floor window, the grotesque

bulbs of her knees rubbing and shivering as she reached.

Bertha lifted back her wisp of furiously sooty little panties to show

the purple smears. A cranberry of a little man rubbed his chin and

said "M-m-m-m" and a young woman in an alpine hat opened her notebook.

"Chita--these bane good people here--to help you."

Suddenly the little monkey-like focus of Chita's gaze seemed to slide

right down the bridge of her nose and up to Bertha!

"Cops!" she cried and sprang back.

"No, Chita--good people----"

"Cops! You dirty snitch. You got the cops on me--the plain closes

bulls--you dirty bloke--I diden do nawthin--he was a dago sailor and

he gimme a dime--that's all--you dirty square head--snitch--the lord

hates a snitch--me brud'--he'll knock the stuffin's out of

you--snitch you--dirty square head snitch--I'll sick me brud' on

you----"

They carried Chita struggling between them into the little enclosed

wagonette at the curb. A light tan omnibus with curtains at the

window of the rear door.

"Chita," cried Bertha, and stood there with the tears raining down

her cheeks, "Chita--mine----"

"Bloke--you--dirty--snitch--bloke!"

Against the little window of the rear door of the omnibus, her simian

little furious face with the Jocko eyes and the twitchings of rage

grimaced back at her.

"Bloke--dirty snitch--square-head--hate yuh--lunk----"

Chita who had loved so to listen to the tick of Bertha's heart.

Chita. After a while the face became a blur.