My wife, said the Pole, was a long time recovering from the birth of
our second child. She was a normal and healthy woman, but Nature has a
way in these matters of introducing the unnatural; science, too, mistook
the ABCs of the case for the XYZs; and our rooms were for many, many
weary weeks like a cage in which the bird has ceased to sing. I did what
I could. She was not without books, magazines, and delicacies; but I had
to attend to my business; so that time hung about her much like a
millstone, and she would say: "All's well with me, Michael, but I am
bored--bored--bored."
Our baby was put out to nurse and our older boy, Casimir, who was seven,
began, for lack of his mother's care, to come and go as he pleased. The
assurance and cheek of street boys began to develop in him. He startled
me by his knowledge and his naïveté. But at the same time he was a
natural innocent--a little dreamer. In the matters of street life that
arise among children he had, as a rule, the worst of it. He was a born
believer of all that might be told him. Such children develop into
artists or ne'er-do-wells. It was too soon to worry about him. But I was
easiest in mind when I saw that he was fashioning anatomies with mud or
drawing with chalk upon the sidewalk. "Wait a little," I would say to my
wife, "and he will be old enough to go to school."
The happiest times were when it was dark and I had closed the store and
could sit by my wife's bed with Casimir on my knee. Then we would talk
over pleasant experiences, or I would tell them, who were both
American-born, stories of Poland, of fairies, and sieges; or hum for
them the tunes to which I had danced in my early youth. But oftenest my
wife and I talked, for the child's benefit, of the wonderful city in
whose slums we lived--upper central New York with its sables and its
palaces. During our courtship and honeymoon we had made many excursions
into those quarters of the city and the memory of them was dear. But if
I remembered well and with happiness, my wife remembered
photographically and with a kind of hectic eagerness in which, I fear,
may have been bedded the roots of dissatisfaction. Details of wealth and
luxury, and manners that had escaped me, even at the time, were as
facile to her as terms of endearment to a lover. "And, oh--do you
remember," she would say, "the ruby that the Fifth Avenue bride had at
her throat, and how for many, many blocks we thought we could still
hear the organ going? That was fun, Michael, wasn't it, when we stood in
front of Sherry's and counted how many real sables went in and how many
fakes, and noticed that the fake sables were as proudly carried as
the real?"
One night she would not eat her supper. "Oh, Michael," she said, "I'm so
bored with the same old soup--soup--soup, and the same old
porridge--porridge--porridge, and I hate oranges, and apples, and please
don't spend any more money on silly, silly, silly me."
"But you must eat," I said. "What would you like? Think of something.
Think of something that tempts your appetite. You seem better
to-night--almost well. Your cheeks are like cherries and you keep
stirring restlessly as if you wanted to get up instead of lying
still--still like a woman that has been drowned, all but her great, dear
eyes.... Now, make some decision, and were it ambrosia I will get it for
you if it is to be had in the city.... Else what are savings-banks for,
and thrift, and a knowledge of furs?"
She answered me indirectly.
"Do you remember, Michael," she said, "the butcher shops uptown, the
groceries, and the fruit stores, where the commonest articles, the
chops, the preserved strawberries, the apples were perfect and
beautiful, like works of art? In one window there was a great olive
branch in a glass jar--do you remember? And in that fruit store near the
Grand Central--do you remember?--we stood in the damp snow and looked in
at great clean spaces flooded with white light--and there were baskets
of strawberries--right there in January--and wonderful golden and red
fruits that we did not know the names of, and many of the fruits peeped
out from the bright-green leaves among which they had actually grown--"
"I remember the two prize bunches of grapes," I said.
And my wife said:
"I was coming to those ... they must have been eighteen inches long,
every grape great and perfect. I remember you said that such grapes
looked immortal. It was impossible to believe they could ever rot--there
was a kind of joyous frostiness--we went in and asked a little man what
kind of grapes they were, and he answered like a phonograph, without
looking or showing politeness: 'Black Hamburgs and White Muscats of
Alexandria'--your old Sienkiewicz never said anything as beautiful as
that, 'White Muscats of Alexandria--'"
"Dear little heart," I said. "Childkin, is it the memory of those white
grapes that tempts your appetite?"
"Oh, Michael," she exclaimed, clasping her hands over those
disappointed breasts into which the milk had not come in sufficiency.
"Oh, Michael--they were two dollars and a half a pound--"
"Heart of my heart," I said, "Stag Eyes, it is now late, and there are
no such grapes to be had in our part of the city--only the tasteless
white grapes that are packed with sawdust into barrels--but in the
morning I will go uptown and you shall have your White Muscats of
Alexandria."
She put her arms about my neck with a sudden spasm of fervor, and drew
my head, that was already gray, down to hers. I remember that in that
moment I thought not of passion but of old age, parting, and the grave.
* * * * *
But she would not eat the grapes in my presence. There was to be an
orgy, she said, a bacchanalian affair--she was going to place the grapes
where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the
sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and
devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes--almost neurotically.
But, though her fancies did not please my sense of fitness, I only
laughed at her, or smiled--for she had been ill a long time.
"But, at least, eat one now," I said, "so that I may see you enjoy it."
"Not even one," she said. "The bunch must be perfect for me to look at
until--until I can resist no more. Hang them there, on the foot of the
bed by the crook of the stem--is it strong enough to hold them? and
then--aren't you going to be very late to your business? And, Michael, I
feel better--I do. I shouldn't wonder if you found me up and dressed
when you come back."
In your telling American phrase, "there was nothing doing" in my
business that morning. It was one of those peaceful, sunny days in
January, not cold and no wind stirring. The cheap furs displayed in the
window of my shop attracted no attention from the young women of the
neighborhood. The young are shallow-minded, especially the women. If a
warm day falls in winter they do not stop to think that the next may be
cold. Only hats interest them all the year round, and men.
So I got out one of my Cicero books and, placing my chair in a pool of
sunshine in the front of the shop, I began to read, for the hundredth
time, his comfortable generalities upon old age. But it seemed to me,
for the first time, that he was all wrong--that old age is only
dreadful, only a shade better than death itself. And this, I suppose,
was because I, myself, during those long months of my wife's illness,
had turned the corner. The sudden passions of youth had retreated like
dragons into their dens. It took more, now, than the worse end of a
bargain or the touch of my wife's lips to bring them flaming forth. On
our wedding day we had been of an age. Now, after nine years, my heart
had changed from a lover's into a father's, while she remained, as it
were, a bride. There remained to me, perhaps, many useful years of
business, of managing and of saving--enjoyable years. But life--life as
I count life--I had lived out. One moment must pass as the next. There
could be no more halting--no more moments of bliss so exquisite as to
resemble pain. I had reached that point in life when it is the sun alone
that matters, and no more the moon.
A shadow fell upon my pool of sunshine and, looking up, I perceived a
handsome, flashy young man of the clever, almost Satanic type that is so
common below Fourteenth Street; and he stood looking cynically over the
cheap furs in my window and working his thin jaws. Then I saw him take,
with his right hand, from a bunch that he carried in his left, a great
white grape and thrust it into his mouth. They were my grapes, those
which I had gone uptown to fetch for my wife. By the fact that there
were none such to be had in our neighborhood I might have known them.
But the sure proof was a peculiar crook in the stem which I had noticed
when I had hung them for my wife at the foot of her bed.