How difficult it is to think of great lives in terms of the small
mosaics that go to make up the pattern of every man's day-by-day--the
too tepid shaving-water; the badly laundered shirt-front; the
three-minute egg; the too-short fourth leg of the table; the draught on
the neck; the bad pen; the neighboring rooster; the misplaced key; the
slipping chest-protector.
Richelieu, who walked with kings, presided always at the stitching of
his red robes. Boswell says somewhere that a badly starched stock could
kill his Johnson's morning. It was the hanging of his own chintzes that
first swayed William Morris from epic mood to household utensils.
Seneca, first in Latin in the whole Silver Age, prepared his own
vegetables. There is no outgrowing the small moments of life, and to
those lesser ones of us how often they become the large ones!
To Samuel Lipkind, who, in a span of thirty years, had created and
carried probably more than his share of this world's responsibilities,
there was no more predominant moment in all his day, even to the signing
of checks and the six-o'clock making of cash, than that matinal instant,
just fifteen minutes before the stroke of seven, when Mrs. Lipkind, in
a fuzzy gray wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed him awake,
and, from across the hall, he could hear the harsh sing of his bath in
the drawing.
There are moments like that which never grow old. For the fifteen years
that Samuel Lipkind had reached the Two Dollar Hat Store before his two
clerks, he had awakened to that same kiss on his slightly open mouth,
the gray hair and the ever-graying eyes close enough to be stroked, the
pungency of coffee seeming to wind like wreaths of mundane aroma above
the bed, and always across the aisle of hallway that tepid cataract
leaping in glory into porcelain.
Take the particular morning which ushers in our story, although it might
have been any of twelve times three hundred others.
"Sammy!" This upon opening his door, then crossing to close the
conservative five inches of open window and over to the bedside for the
kissing him awake. "Sammy, get up!"
The snuggle away into the crotch of his elbow.
"Sammy! _Thu, thu_! I can't get him up! Sammy, a quarter to seven! You
want to be late? I can't get him up!"
"M-m-m-m-m-m!"
"You want your own clerks to beat you to business so they can say they
got a lazy boss?"
"I'm awake, ma." Reaching up to stroke her hair, thin and gray now, and
drawn back into an early-morning knob.
"Don't splash in the bath-room so this morning, Sammy; it's a shame for
the wall-paper."
"I won't"--drawing the cord of his robe about his waist, and as if they
did not both of them know just how faithfully disregarded would be that
daily admonition.
Then Mrs. Lipkind flung back the snowy sheets and bed-coverings, baring
the striped ticking of the mattress.
"Hurry, Sammy! I'm up so long I'm ready for my second cup of coffee."
"Two minutes." And off across the hall, whistling, towel across arm.
It was that little early moment sublimated by nothing more than the
fusty beginnings of a workaday, the mere recollecting of which was one
day to bring a wash of tears behind his eyes and a twist of anguish into
his heart.
Next breakfast, and to dine within reach of the coal-range which brews
it is so homely a fashion that even Mr. Lipkind, upon whom such matters
of bad form lay as a matter of course, was wont to remonstrate.
"What's the matter with the dining-room, ma? Since when have
dining-rooms gone out of style?"
Pouring his coffee from the speckled granite pot, Mrs. Lipkind would
smile up and over it.
"All I ask is my son should never have it worse than to eat all his
lifetime in just such a kitchen like mine. Off my kitchen floor I would
rather eat than off some people's fine polished mahogany."
The mahogany was almost not far-fetched. There was a blue-and-white
spick-and-spanness about Mrs. Lipkind's kitchen which must lie within
the soul of the housewife who achieves it--the lace-edged shelves, the
scoured armament of dishpan, soup-pot, and what not; the white Swiss
window-curtains, so starchy, and the two regimental geraniums on the
sill; the roller-towel too snowy for mortal hand to smudge; the white
sink, hand-polished; the bland row of blue-and-white china jars spicily
inscribed to nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. That such a kitchen could be
within the tall and brick confines of an upper-Manhattan apartment-house
was only another of the thousand thousand paradoxes over which the city
spreads her glittering skirts. The street within roaring distance, the
highway of Lenox Avenue flowing dizzily constantly past her windows, the
interior of Mrs. Lipkind's apartment, from the chromos of the dear dead
upon its walls to the upholstery of another decade against those walls,
was as little of the day as if the sweep of the city were a gale across
a mid-Victorian plain and the flow past the windows a broad river
ruffled by wind.
"You're right, ma; there's not a kitchen in New York I'd trade it for.
But what's the idea of paying rent on a dining-room?"
"Sa-y, if not for when Clara comes and how in America all young people
got extravagant ideas, we was just as well off without one in our three
rooms in Simpson Street."
"A little more of that mackerel, please."
You to whom the chilled grapefruit and the eggshell cup of morning
coffee are a gastronomic feat not always easy to hurdle, raise not your
digestive eyebrows. At precisely fifteen minutes past seven six mornings
in the week, seven-thirty, Sundays, Mrs. Lipkind and her son sat down to
a breakfast that was steamingly fit for those only who dwell in the
headacheless kingdom of long, sleepful nights and fur-coatless tongues.
"A few more fried potatoes with it, Sammy?"
"Whoa! You want to feed me up for the fat boys' regiment!"
Mrs. Lipkind glanced quickly away, her profile seeming to quiver. "Don't
use that word, Sam--even in fun--it's a knife in me."
"What word?"
"'Regiment.'"
He reached across to pat the vein-corduroyed back of her hand.
"My little sweetheart mamma," he said.
She, in turn, put out her hand over his, her old sagging throat visibly
constricting in a gulp, and her eyes as if they could never be finished
with yearning over him. "You're a good boy, Sammy."
"Sure!"
"I always say no matter what it is bad my life has had for me with my
twenty-five years a widow, my only daughter to marry out six hundred
miles away from me, my business troubles when I had to lose the little
store what your papa left me, nothing ain't nothing, Sammy, when a
mother can raise for herself a boy like mine."
"You mean when a fellow can pick out for himself a little sweetheart
mamma like mine."
"Sammy, stop it with your pinching-me nonsense like I was your best
girl!"
"Well, ain't you?"
She paused, her cup of coffee half-way to her lips, the lines of her
face seeming to want to lift into what would be a smile. "No, Sammy;
your mother knows she ain't, and if she was anything but a selfish old
woman, she would be glad that she ain't."
"'Sh! 'Sh!" said Mr. Lipkind, reaching this time half across the table
for a still steaming muffin and opening it so that its hot fragrance
came out. '"Sh! No April showers! Uh! Uh! Don't you dare!"
"I ain't," said Mrs. Lipkind, smiling through her tear and dashing at it
with the back of her hand. "For why should I when I got only everything
to be thankful for?"
"Now you're shouting!"
"How you think, Sammy, Clara likes a cheese pie for supper to-night?
Last week I could see she didn't care much for the noodle pudding I
baked her."
Mr. Lipkind, who was ever so slightly and prematurely bald and still
more slightly and prematurely rotund, suffered a rush of color then, his
ears suddenly and redly conspicuous.
"That's--that's what I started to tell you last night, ma. Clara
telephoned over to the store in the afternoon she--she thought she
wouldn't come to supper this Wednesday night, ma."
"Sammy--you--you and Clara 'ain't got nothing wrong together, the way
you don't see each other so much these two months?"
"Of course not, ma; it's just happened a few times that way. The
trade's in town; that's all."
"How is it all of a sudden a girl in the wholesale ribbon
business should have the trade to entertain like she was in the
cloak-and-suit chorus?"
"It's not that Clara's busy to-night, ma. She--she only thought she--for
a change--there's a little side table for two--for three--where she
boards--she thought maybe if--if you didn't mind, I'd go over to her
place for Wednesday-night supper for a change. You know how a girl like
Clara gets to feeling obligated."
"Obligated from eating once a week supper in her own future house!"
"She asked I should bring you, too, ma, but I know how bashful you are
to go in places like that."
"In such a place where it's all style and no food--yes."
"That's it; so we--I thought, ma, that is, if you don't mind, instead of
Clara here to-night for supper, I--I'd go over to her place. If you
don't mind, ma."
There was a silence, so light, so slight that it would not have even
held the dropping of a pin, but yet had a depth and a quality that set
them both to breathing faster.
"Why, of course, Sammy, you should go!"
"I--we thought for a change."
"You should have told me yesterday, Sammy, before I marketed poultry."
"I know, ma; I--just didn't. Clara only 'phoned at four."
"A few more fried potatoes?"
"No more."
"Sit up straight, Sam, from out your round shoulders."
"You ain't--mad, ma?"
"For why, Sammy, should I be mad that you go to Clara for a change to
supper. I'm glad if you get a change."
"It's not that, ma. It's just that she asked it. You know how a person
feels, her taking her Wednesday-night suppers here for more than five
years and never once have I--we--set foot in any of her boarding-houses.
She imagines she's obligated. You know how Clara is, so independent."
"You should go. I hear, too, how Mrs. Schulem sets a good table."
"I'll be home by nine, ma--you sure you don't mind?"
"I wouldn't mind, Sammy, if it was twelve. Since when is it that a
grown-up son has to apologize to his mother if he takes a step
without her?"
"You can believe me, ma, but I've got so it don't seem like theater or
nothing seems like going out without my little sweetheart mamma on one
arm and Clara on the other."
"It's not right, Sammy, you should spoil me so. Don't think that even if
you don't let me talk about it, I don't know in my heart how I'm in
yours and Clara's way."
"Ma, now just you start that talk and you know what I'll do--I'll get up
and leave the table."
"Sammy, if only you would let me talk about it!"
"You heard what I said."
"To think my son should have to wait with his engagement for five years
and never once let his mother ask him why it is he waits. It ain't
because of to-night I want to talk about it, Sam, but if I thought it
was me that had stood between you and Clara all these five years, if--if
I thought it was because of me you don't see each other so much here
lately, I--"
"Ma!"
"I couldn't stand it, son. If ever a boy deserved happiness, that boy is
you. A boy that scraped his fingers to the bone to marry his sister off
well. A boy that took the few dollars left from my notion-store and made
such a success in retail men's hats and has given it to his mother like
a queen. If I thought I was standing in such a boy's way, who ain't only
a grand business man and a grand son and brother, but would make any
girl the grandest husband that only his father before him could equal, I
couldn't live, Sammy, I couldn't live."
"You should know how sick such talk makes me!"
"I haven't got hard feelings, Sammy, because Clara don't like it here."
"She does."
"For why should an up-to-date American girl like Clara like such an
old-fashioned place as I keep? Nowadays, girls got different ideas. They
don't think nothing of seventy-five-dollar suits and twelve-dollar
shoes. I can't help it that it goes against my grain no matter how fine
a money-maker a girl is. In the old country my sister Carrie and me
never even had shoes on our feet until we were twelve, much less--"
"But, ma--"
"Oh, I don't blame her, Sam. I don't blame her that she don't like it
the way I dish up everything on the table so we can serve ourselves. She
likes it passed the way they did that night at Mrs. Goldfinger's new
daughter-in-law's, where everything is carried from one to the next one,
and you got to help yourself quick over your shoulders."
"Clara's like me, ma; she wants you to keep a servant to do the waiting
on you."
"It ain't in me, Sam, to be bossed to by a servant, just like I can't
take down off the walls pictures of your papa _selig_ and your grandma,
because it ain't stylish they should be there. It's a feeling in me for
my own flesh and blood that nothing can change."
"Clara don't want you to change that, ma."
"She's a fine, up-to-date girl, Sam. A girl that can work herself up to
head floor-lady in wholesale ribbons and forty dollars a week has got in
her the kind of smartness my boy should have in his wife. I'm an old
woman standing in the way of my boy. If I wasn't, I could go out to
Marietta, Ohio, by Ruby, and I wouldn't keep having inside of me such
terrible fears for my boy and--and how things are now on the other side
and--and--"
"Now, now, ma; no April showers!"
"An old woman that can't even be happy with a good daughter like Ruby,
but hangs always on her son like a stone around his neck!"
"You mean like a diamond."
"A stone, holding him down."
"Ma!" Mr. Lipkind pushed back, napkin awry at his throat and his eyes
snapping points of light. "Now if you want to spoil my breakfast, just
say so and I--I'll quit. Why should you be living with Ruby out in
Marietta if you're happier here with me where you belong? If you knew
how sore these here fits of yours make me, you'd cut them out--that's
what you would. I'm not going over to Clara's at all now for supper, if
that's how you feel about it."
Mrs. Lipkind rose then, crossed, leaning over the back of his chair and
inclosing his face in the quivering hold of her two hands. "Sammy,
Sammy, I didn't mean it! I know I ain't in your way. How can I be when
there ain't a day passes I don't invite you to get married and come here
to live and fix the flat any way what Clara wants or even move down-town
in a finer one where she likes it? I know I ain't in your way, son. I
take it back."
"Well, that's more like it."
"You mustn't be mad at mamma when she gets old-fashioned ideas in her
head."
He stroked her hand at his cheek, pressing it closer.
"Sit down and finish your breakfast, little sweetheart mamma."
"Is it all right now, Sammy?"
"Of course it is!" he said, his eyes squeezed tightly shut.
"Promise mamma you'll go over by Clara's to-night."
"But--"
"Promise me, Sammy; I can't stand it if you don't."
"Alright, I'll go, ma."
The Declaration of Economic Independence is not always a subtle one.
There was that about Clara Bloom, even to the rather Hellenic swing of
her very tailor-made back and the firm, neat clack of her not too high
heels, which proclaimed that a new century had filed her fetter-free
from the nine-teen-centuries-long chain of women whose pin-money had too
often been blood-money or the filched shekels from trousers pocket or
what in the toga corresponded thereto.
And yet, when Miss Bloom smiled, which upon occasion she did
spontaneously enough to show a gold molar, there were not only Hypatia
and Portia in the straight line of her lips, but lurked in the little
tip-tilt at the corners a quirk from Psyche, who loved and was so loved,
and in the dimple in her chin a manhole, as it were, for Mr.
Samuel Lipkind.
At six o'clock, where the wintry workaday flows into dusk and Fifth
Avenue flows across Broadway, they met, these two, finding each other
out in the gaseous shelter of a Subway kiosk. She from the tall, thin,
skylightless skyscraper dedicated to the wholesale supply of woman's
insatiable demand for the ribbon gewgaw; he from a plate-glass shop with
his name inscribed across its front and more humbly given over to the
more satiable demand of the male for the two-dollar hat. There was a
gold-and-black sign which ran across the not inconsiderable width of
Mr. Lipkind's store-front and which invariably captioned his four inches
of Sunday-news-paper advertisement: