candlesticks that came over on the stupendously huge cargo which time
and curio dealers have piled upon the good ship _Mayflower_; engages a
three-room suite on the ninth floor of a European-plan hotel, and
inaugurates upon the sly American paradox of housekeeping in
non-housekeeping apartments.
The Wellington Hotel was a rococo haven for such refugees from the
modern social choler, and its doors flew open and offered them a family
rate, excellent cuisine, quarantine.
Excellent cuisine, however, is a clever but spiceless parody on home
cookery.
Mr. Binswanger read his evening menu with the furrow deepening between
his eyes.
"Such a soup they got! Mulla-ga-what?"
"'Shh-h-h, papa; mullagatawny! Rice soup."
"Mullagatawny! Fine mess!"
"'Shh-h-h, Julius; don't talk so loud. Does the whole dining-room got to
know you don't know nothing?"
Mrs. Binswanger took nervous resume of the red-and-gold, bright-lighted
dining-room.
"For a plate of noodles soup, Becky, they can have all their
mullagatawny! Fifteen cents for a plate of soup, Becky, and at home for
that you could make a whole pot full twice so good."
"'Sh-h-h-h, papa."
"Don't '_sh-h-h-h-h_ me no more neither, Pearlie. Five months, from
October to February, I been shooed like I was one of our roosters at
home got over in Schlossman's yard. There, you read for me, Izzy; such
language I don't know."
Isadore took up a card and crinkled one eye in a sly wink toward his
mother and sister.
"_Rinderbrust und Kartoffel Salad_, pa, _mit Apful Kuechen und
Kaletraufschnitt._"
"Ya, ya, make fun yet! A square meal like that should happen to me yet
in a highway-robbery place like this."
Mrs. Binswanger straightened her large-bosomed, stiff-corseted figure in
its large-design, black-lace basque, and pulled gently at her daughter's
flesh-colored chiffon sleeve, which fell from her shoulders like angels'
wings.
"Look across the room, Poil. There's Max just coming in the dining-room
with his mother. Always the first thing he looks over at our table. Bow,
Julius; don't you see across the room the Teitlebaums coming in? I guess
old man Teitlebaum is out on the road again."
Miss Binswanger flushed the same delicate pink as her chiffon, and
showed her oval teeth in a vivid smile.
"Ain't he silly, though, to-night, mamma! Look, when he holds up two
fingers at me it means first he takes his mother up to her pinochle
club, and then by nine o'clock he comes back to me."
"How good that woman has got it! Look, Poil, another waist she's wearing
again."
"Look how he pulls out the chair for his mother, Izzy. It would hurt you
to do that for me and mamma, wouldn't it?"
"Say, missy, I learnt manners two years before you ever done anything
but hold down the front porch out on Newton Avenue. I'd been meetin'
Max Teitlebaum and Ignatz Landauer and that crowd over at the Young
Men's Association before you'd ever been to the movie with anybody
except Meena Schlossman."
"I don't see that all your good start got you anywheres."
"Don't let swell society go to your head, missy. You ain't got Max yet,
neither. You ought to be ashamed to be so crazy about a boy. Wait till I
tell you something when we get up-stairs that'll take some of your kink
out, missy."
"Children, children, hush your fussing! Julius, don't read all the names
off the bill of fare."
Miss Binswanger regarded her brother under level brows, and threw him a
retort that sizzed across the table like drops of water on a hot
stove-top.
"Anyways, if I was a fellow that couldn't keep a job more than two
months at a time I'd lay quiet. I wouldn't be out of a job all the time,
and beggin' my father to set me up in business when I was always getting
fired from every place I worked."
"Children!"
"Well, he always starts with me, mamma."
"Izzy, ain't you got no respect for your sister? For Gawd's sakes take
that bill of fare away from your papa, Izzy. He'll burn a hole in it.
Always the prices he reads out loud till so embarrassed I get. No ears
and eyes he has for anything else. He reads and reads, but enough he
don't eat to keep alive a bird."
Mr. Binswanger drew his spectacles off his nose, snapped them into a
worn-leather case and into his vest pocket; a wan smile lay on his
lips.
"I got only eyes for you, Becky, eh? All dressed up, ain't you?--black
lace yet! What you think of your mamma, children? Young she gets, not?"
"_Ach_, Julius!"
The little bout of tenderness sent a smile around the table, and behind
the veil of her lashes Miss Binswanger sent the arrow of a glance across
the room.
"Honest, mamma, I wonder if Max sees anything green on me."
"He sees something sweet on you, maybe, Poil. Izzy, pass your papa some
radishes. Not a thing does that man eat, and such an appetite he used to
have."
"Radishes better as these we get in our yard at home. Ten cents for six
radishes! Against my appetite it goes to eat 'em, when in my yard at
home--"
"Home, always home!"
"Papa, please don't put your napkin in your collar like a bib. Mamma,
make him take it out. Honest, even for the waiter I'm ashamed. How he
watches us, too, and laffs behind the tray."
"Leave me alone, Pearlie. My shirt-front I don't use for no bib! Laundry
rates in this hold-up place ain't so cheap."
"Mamma, please make him take it out."
"Julius!"
"Look, papa, at the Teitlebaums and Schoenfeldts, laughing at us, papa.
Look now at him, mamma; just for to spite me he bends over and drinks
his soup out loud out of the tip of his spoon--please, papa."
Mr. Binswanger jerked his napkin from its mooring beneath each ear and
peered across at his daughter with his face as deeply creased as a
raisin.
"I wish," he said, low in his throat, and with angry emphasis quivering
his lips behind the gray and black bristles of his mustache--"ten times
a day I wish I was back in my little house in Newton, where I got my
comfort and my peace--you children I got to thank for this, you
children."
Mr. Isadore Binswanger replaced his spoon in his soup-plate and leaned
back against his chair.
"Aw now, papa, for God's sakes don't begin!"
"You good-for-nothing, you! With your hair combed up straight on your
head like a girl's, and a pleated shirt like I'd be ashamed to carry in
stock, you got no put-in! If I give you five thousand dollars for a
business for yourself you don't care so much what kind of manners I got.
Five thousand dollars he asks me for to go in business when he ain't got
it in him to keep a job for six months."
"The last job wasn't--"
"Right now in this highway-robbery hotel you got me into, I got to pay
your board for you--if you want five thousand dollars from me you got to
get rid of me some way, for my insurance policy is all I can say. And
sometimes I wish you would--easier for me it would be."
"Julius!"
His son crumpled his napkin and tossed it toward the center of the
table. His soft, moist lips were twisted in anger, and his voice, under
cover of a whisper, trembled with that same anger.
"For what little board you've paid for me I can't hear about it no more.
I'll go out and--"
"'Sh-h-h, Izzy--'sh-h-h, papa, all over the dining-room they can hear
you, 'sh-h-h!"
"Home I ain't never denied my children--open doors they get always in my
house but in a highway-robbery hotel, where I can't afford--"
"We got the cheapest family rates here. Such rates we get here,
children, and highway robbery your father calls it!"
"Five months we been in the city, and three months already a empty house
standing out there waiting, and nothing from it coming in. A house I
love like my life, a house what me and your mamma wish we was back in
every minute of the day!"
"I only said, Julius, for myself I like my little home best, but--"
"I ain't got the strength for the street-car ride no more. I ain't got
appetite for this sloppy American food no more. I can't breathe no more
in that coop up-stairs. Right now you should know how my feet hurt for
slippers; a collar I got to wear to supper when like a knife it cuts me.
I can't afford this. I got such troubles with business I only wish for
one day you should have 'em. I want my little house, my porch, my vines,
and my chickens. I want my comforts. My son ain't my boss."
Isadore pushed back from the table, his jaw low and sullen.
"I ain't going to sit through a meal and be abused like--like I was a--"
"You ain't got to sit; stand up, then."
"Izzy--for God's sakes, Izzy, the people! Julius, so help me if I come
down to a meal with you again. Look, Julius, for God's sake--the
Teitlebaums are watching us--the people! Smile at me, Poil, like we was
joking. Izzy, if you leave this table now I--I can't stand it! Laugh,
Poil, like we was having our little fun among us."
The women exchanged the ghastly simulacrum of a smile, and the meal
resumed in silence. Only small beads sprang out on the shiny surface of
Mr. Binswanger's head like dewdrops on the glossy surface of leaves, and
twice his fork slipped and clattered from his hand.
"So excited you get right away, Julius. Nervous as a cat you are."
"I--I ain't got the strength no more, Becky. Pink sleeping-tablets I got
to take yet to make me sleep. I ain't got the strength."
"'Shh-h-h, Julius; don't get excited. In the spring we go home. You
don't want, Julius, to spoil everything right this minute. Ain't it
enough the way our Poil has come out in these five months? Such a grand
time that goil has had this winter. Do you want that the Teitlebaums
should know all our business and spoil things?"
"I--I wish sometimes that name I had never heard in my life. In my days
a young girl--"
"'Shh-h-h, Julius; we won't talk about it now--we change the subject."
"I--"
"Look over there, will you, Poil? Always extras the Teitlebaums have on
their table. Paprica, and what is that red stuff? Chili sauce! Such
service we don't get. Pink carnations on their table, too. To-morrow at
the desk I complain. Our money is just as good as theirs."
Miss Binswanger raised her harried eyes from her plate and smiled at her
mother; she was like a dark red rose, trembling, titillating, and with
dewy eyes.
"Don't stare so, mamma."
"Izzy, are you going to stay home to-night? One night it won't hurt you.
Like you run around nights to dance-halls ain't nothing to be proud of."
"Now start something, mamma, so pa can jump on me again. If Pearlie and
Max are going to use the front room this evening, what shall I do? Sit
in a corner till he's gone and I can go to bed?"
"I should care if he goes to dance-halls or not. What I say, Becky,
don't make no difference to my son. Take how I begged him to hold on his
job!"
"If you're done your dessert wait till we get up-stairs, papa. The
dining-room knows already enough of our business."
Miss Binswanger pushed back from the table to her feet. Tears rose in a
sheer film across her eyes, but she smiled with her lips and led the
procession of her family from the gabbling dining-room, her small, dark
head held upward by the check-rein of scorched pride and the corner of
her tear-dimmed glance for the remote table with the centerpiece of
pink carnations.
By what seemed demoniac aforethought the Binswanger three-room suite was
rigidly impervious to sunlight, air, and daylight. Its infinitesimal
sitting-room, which the jerking backward of a couch-cover transformed
into Mr. Isadore Binswanger's bedchamber, afforded a one-window view of
a long, narrow shaft which rose ten stories from a square of asphalt
courtyard, up from which the heterogeneous fumes of cookery wafted like
smoke through a legitimate flue.
Mr. Binswanger dropped into a veteran arm-chair that had long since
finished duty in the deluxe suite, and breathed onward through a beard
as close-napped as Spanish moss.
He was suddenly old and as withered as an aspen leaf trembling on its
rotten stem. Vermiculate cords of veins ran through the flesh like the
chirography of pain written in the blue of an indelible pencil; yellow
crow's-feet, which rayed outward from his eyes, were deep as claw-prints
in damp clay.
"Becky, help me off with my shoes; heavy like lead they feel."
"Poil, unlace your papa's shoes. Since I got to dress for dinner I can't
stoop no more."
Miss Binswanger tugged daintily at her father's boots, staggering
backward at each pull.
"_Ach_, go way, Pearlie! Better than that I can do myself."
"See, mamma; nothing suits him."
Mrs. Binswanger regarded her husband's batrachian sallowness with
anxious eyes; her large bosom heaved under its showy lace yoke, and her
short, dimpled hands twirled at their rings.
"To-night, Julius, if you don't do like the doctor says I telephone him
to come. That a man should be such a coward! It don't do you no good to
take only one sleeping-tablet; two, he said, is what you need."
"Too much sleeping-powder is what killed old man Knauss."
"_Ach_, Julius, you heard yourself what Dr. Ellenburg said. Six of the
little pink tablets he said it would take to kill a man. How can two of
'em hurt you? Already by the bed I got the box of 'em waiting, Julius,
with an orange so they don't even taste."
"It ain't doctors and their _gedinks_, Becky, can do me good. Pink
tablets can't make me sleep. I--_ach_, Becky, I'm tired--tired."
Isadore rose from the couch-bed and punched his head-print out of the
cushion.
"Lay here, pa."
"Na, na, I go me to bed. Such a thing full of lumps don't rest me like a
sofa at home. Na, I go me to bed, Becky."
Isadore relaxed to the couch once more, pillowed his head on interlaced
hands, yawned to the ceiling, blew two columns of cigarette-smoke
through his nostrils, and watched them curl upward.
"This ain't so worse, pa."
"I go me to bed."
"For a little while, Julius, can't you stay up? At nine o'clock comes
Max to see Poil. I always say a young man thinks more of a young girl
when her parents stay in the room a minute."
Isadore fitted his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes and flung one
reclining limb over the other.
"What Max Teitlebaum thinks of Pearlie I already know. To-day he invited
me to lunch with him."
"Izzy!"
"Izzy! Why you been so close-mouthed?"
Mrs. Binswanger threw her short, heavy arm full length across the
table-top and leaned toward her son, so that the table-lamp lighted her
face with its generous scallop of chin and exacerbated the concern in
her eyes.
"You had lunch to-day with Max Teitlebaum, and about Poil you talked!"
"That's what I said."
Miss Binswanger leaned forward in her low rocker, suddenly pink as each
word had been a fillip to her blood, and a faint terra-cotta ran under
the olive of her skin, lighting it.
"Like--fun--you--did!"
"All right then, missy, I'm lyin', and won't say no more."
"I didn't mean it, Izzy!"
"Izzy, tell your sister what he said."
"Well, right to my face she contradicts me."
"Please, Izzy!"
"Well, he--he likes you, all righty--"
"Did he say that about me, honest, Izz?"
Her breath came sweet as thyme between her open lips, and her eyes could
not meet her mother's gaze, which burned against her lids.
"See, Poil! Wake up a minute, papa, and listen. When I mentioned Max
Teitlebaum, papa, you always said a grand boy like one of the Teitlebaum
boys, with such prospects, ain't got no time for a goil like our Poil.
Always I told you that you got to work up the appetite. See, papa, how
things work out! See, Poil! What else did he have to say, Izzy--he likes
her, eh?"
Isadore turned on his side and flecked a rim of ash off his cigarette
with a manicured forefinger.
"Don't get excited too soon, ma. He didn't come out plain and say
anything, but I guess a boy like Max Teitlebaum thinks we don't need a
brick house to fall on us."
"What you mean, Izzy?"
"What I mean? Say, ain't it as plain as the nose on your face? You
don't need two brick houses to fall on you, do you?"
Mrs. Binswanger admitted to a mental phthisis, and threw out her hands
in a gesture of helplessness.
"Believe me, Izzy, maybe I am dumb. So bad my head works when your papa
worries me, but what you mean I don't know."
"Me neither, Izzy!"
"Say, there ain't much to tell. He likes Pearlie--that much he wasn't
bashful to me about. He likes Pearlie, and he wants to go in the general
store and ladies' furnishing goods business. Just clothing like his
father's store he hates. Why should he stay in a business, he says, that
is already built up? His two married brothers, he says, is enough with
his father in the one business."
"Such an ambitious boy always anxious to do for hisself. I wish, Izzy,
you had some of his ambitions. You hear, Poil, in the same business as
papa he wants to go?"
Mrs. Binswanger rocked complacently, a smile crawled across her lips,
and she nodded rhythmically to the tilting of her rocking-chair, her
eyes closed in the pleasant phantasmagoria of a dream.
Mr. Binswanger slumped lower in his chair.
"A good head for business that Max Teitlebaum has on him. Like your
mamma says, Izzy, you should have one just half so good."
"There you go again, pa, pickin', pickin'! If you'd give a fellow a
start and lend him a little capital--I'd have some ambition, too, and
start for myself."
Mr. Binswanger leaped forward full stretch, as a jetty of flame shoots
through a stream of oil.
"For yourself! On what? From where would I get it? Cut it out from my
heart? Two months already I begged you to come out by me in the store
and see if you can't help start something to get back the trade--How we
need young blood in the store to get--"
"Aw, I--"
"Five thousand dollars I give you for to lose in the ladies'
ready-to-wear. Another white elephant we need in the family yet. Not
five thousand dollars outside my insurance I got to my name, and even if
I did have it I wouldn't--"
"Julius!"
"I mean it, so help me! Even if I did have it, not a cent to a boy what
don't listen to his old father."
"For God's sakes, pa, quit your hollering; if you ain't got it to your
name I'm sorry for Pearlie."
"For me?"
"You think, pa, a boy like Max Teitlebaum, a boy that banker Finburg's
daughter is crazy after, is getting married only because you got a nice
daughter?"
"What do you mean, Izzy?"
"The woods are full of 'em just as nice. I didn't need no brick house
to fall on me to-day at lunch. He didn't come right out and say nothing,
but when he said he wanted to get in a business he could build up, right
away I seen what he meant."
"What?"
"Sure I seen it. I guess his father gives him six or seven thousand
dollars to get his start, and just so much he wants from the girl's
side. He can get it easy, too. If--if you'd fork over, pa, I--him and I
could start maybe together and--"
"You--you--"
"Your papa, Izzy, can do for his girl just like the best can do for
theirs Julius, can't you?"
"_Gott in Himmel!_ I--I--you--you pack of wolfs, you!"
"Such names you can't call your wife, Julius! Just let me tell you that!
Such names you can't call me!"
Anger trembled in Mrs. Binswanger's vocal cords like current running
over a wire. But Mr. Binswanger sprang suddenly to his feet and crashed
the white knuckles of his clenched fist down on the table with a force
that broke the flesh. The red lights of anger lay mirrored in the pool
of his eyes like danger lanterns on a dark bridge are reflected in black
water.
"Wolfs--wolfs, all of you! You--you--to-night you got me where I am at
an end! To-night you got to _know_--I--I can't keep it in no more--you
got--to _know_ to-night--to-night!"
His voice caught in a tight knot of strangulation; he was dithering and
palsied.
"To-night--you--you got to know!"
A sudden trembling took Mrs. Binswanger.
"For God's sakes, know what, Julius--know what?"
"I'm done for! I'm gone under! Till it happened you wouldn't believe me.
Two years I seen it coming, two years I been fightin' and
fightin'--fightin' it by myself! And now for yourselves you look in the
papers two weeks from to-morrow, the first of March, and see--I'm done
for--I'm gone under, I--"
"Julius--my God, you--you ain't, Julius, you ain't!"
His voice rose like a gale.
"I'm gone under--I ain't got twenty cents on the dollar. I'm gone,
Becky. Beat up! To-morrow two weeks the creditors, they're on me! My
last extension expires, and they're on me. I been fightin' and fightin'.
Twenty cents on the dollar I can't meet, Becky--I can't, Becky, I can't!
I been fightin' and fightin', but I can't, Becky--I--can't! I'm gone!"
"Pa."
"Julius, Julius, for God's sakes, you--you don't mean it,
Julius--you--don't--mean it--you're fooling us--Julius!"
Small, cold tears welled to the corners of his eyes.
"I'm gone, Becky--and now he--he wants the shirt off my back--he can
have it, God knows. But--but--_ach_, Becky--I--I wish I could have saved
_you_--but that a man twice so strong as his father--_ach, Gott_,
what--what's the use? I'm gone, Becky, gone!"
Mr. Isadore Binswanger swung to his feet and regarded his parent with
the dazed eyes of a sleepwalker awakening on a perilous ledge.
"Aw, pa, for--for God's sake, why didn't you tell a fellow? I--we--aw,
pa, I--I can knuckle down if I got to. Gee whiz! how was a fellow to
know? You--you been cuttin' up about everything since--since we was
kids; aw, pa--please--gimme a chance, pa, I can knuckle down--pa--pa!"
He approached the racked form of his father as if he would throw himself
a stepping-stone at his feet, and then because his voice stuck in his
throat and ached until the tears sprang to his eyes he turned suddenly
and went out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
The echo hung for a moment.
Miss Binswanger lay whitely in her chair, weakened as if the blood had
flowed out of her heart. From the granitoid square at the base of the
air-shaft came the rattle of after-dinner dishes and the babble of
dialect. Mr. Binswanger wept the tears of physical weakness.
"I--I'm gone, Becky. What you want for Poil I can't do. I'm gone under.
We got to start over again. It was the interurban done it, Becky. I
needed new capital to meet the new competition. I--I could have stood up
under it then, Becky, but--but--"
"_Ach_, my husband--for myself I don't care. _Ach_, my husband."
"I--I'm gone, Becky--gone."
He rose to his feet and shambled feebly to his bedroom, his fingers
feeling of the furniture for support, and his breath coming in the long
wheezes of dry tears. And in the cradle of her mother's arms Miss
Binswanger wept the hot tears of black despair; they seeped through the
showy lace yoke and scalded her mother's heart.
"Oh, my baby! _Ach_, my husband! A good man like him, a good man like
him!"
"Don't cry, mamma, don't--cry."
"Nothing he ever refused me, and now when we should be able to do for
our children and--"
"Don't cry, mamma, don't cry."
"If--if he had the money--for a boy like Max--he'd give it, Poil. Such a
good husband--such--_ach_, I go me in to papa now--poor papa. I've been
bad, Poil; we must make it up to him; we--"
"'Sh-h-h!"
"We got to start over again, Poil--to the bone I'll work my fingers,
I--"
"'Shh-h-h, mamma,'sh-h-h--somebody's knocking."
They raised their tear-ravaged faces in the attitude of listening, their
eyes salt-bitten and glazed.
"It's--it's Izzy, baby. See how sorry he gets right away. He ain't a bad
boy, Poil, only always I've spoilt him. Come in, my boy--come in, and
go in to your papa."
The door swung open and fanned backward the stale air in a sharp gust,
and the women sprang apart mechanically as automatons, the sagging,
open-mouthed vacuity of surprise on Mrs. Binswanger's face, the tears
still wet on her daughter's cheeks and lying lightly on her lashes like
dew.
"Mr. Teitlebaum."
"Max!"
Mr. Teitlebaum hesitated at the threshold, the flavor of his amorous
spirit tasty on his lips and curving them into a smile.
"That's my name! Hello, Pearlie girlie! How-dye-do, Mrs.
Binswanger--what what--"
He regarded them with dark, quiet eyes, the quick red of embarrassment
running high in his face and under his tight-fitting cap of close-nap
black hair.
"Ah, excuse me; I might have known. I--I'm too early. Like my mother
says, I was in such a hurry to--to get back here again I--I nearly got
out and pushed the Subway--I--you must excuse me. I--"
"No, no; sit down, Mr. Teitlebaum. Pearlie ain't feelin' so well this
evening; she's all right now, though. Such a cold she's got, ain't you,
Poil?"
"Yes--yes. Such a cold I got. Sit--sit down, Max."
He regarded her with the rims of his eyes stretched wide in anxiety.
"Down at supper so well you looked, Pearlie; I says to my mother, like a
flower you looked."
A fog of tears rose sheer before her.
"Her papa, Mr. Teitlebaum, he ain't so well, neither. Just now he went
to bed, and he--he said to you I should give his excuses."
"So! Ain't that too bad, now!"
"Sit down, Max, there, next to mamma."