Part 3

"It ain't six o'clock yet, Abie—something ain't right with you!"

"Don't get excited, mamma! I just closed early for the heat. For what should I keep open when a patent-leather shoe burns a hole in your hand?"

"Ach, such a scare as you give me! If I'd 'a' known it I could have had supper ready. It wouldn't hurt you to call up-stairs when you close early—no consideration that boy has got for his mother! Poor papa! If he so much as closed the store ten minutes earlier he used to call up for me to heat the things—no consideration that boy has got for his old mother!"

Mr. Ginsburg placed a heavy hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kissed her while the words were unfinished and smoking on her lips.

"It's too hot to eat, mamma. Ain't I asked you every night during this heat not to cook so much?"

"Just the same, when it comes to the table I see you eat. I never see you refuse nothing—I bet you come twice for apple-pie to-night. Is the hall table the place for your cuffs, Abie? I'm ashamed for the people the way my house looks when you're home—no order that boy has got! I go now and put my pie in the oven."

"I ain't hungry, mamma—honest! Don't fix no supper for me—I go in the front room and lay down for a while. Never have I known such heat as I had it in the store to-day—and with Miss Ruby gone it was bad enough, I can tell you."

Mrs. Ginsburg reached up suddenly and turned high a tiny bead of gas-light—it flared for a moment like a ragged-edged fan and then settled into a sooty flare. In its low-candle-power light their faces were far away and without outline—like shadows seen through the mirage of a dream.

"Abie—tell mamma—you ain't sick, are you? Abie, you look pale."

"Now, mamma, begin to worry about nothing when—"

"It ain't like you to come up early, heat or no heat. Ach! I should have known when he comes up-stairs early it means something. What hurts you, Abie? That's what I need yet, a sickness! What hurts you, Abie?"

"Mamma, the way you go on it's enough to make me sick if I ain't. Can't a boy come up-stairs just because—"

"I know you like a book; when you close the store and lay down before supper there's something wrong. Tell me, Abie—"

"All right, then! You know it so well I can't tell you nothing—all I got is a little tiredness from the heat."

"Go in and lay down. Can't you tell mamma what hurts you, Abie? Are you afraid it would give me a little pleasure if you tell me? No consideration that boy has got for his mother!"

"Honest, mamma, ain't I told you three times I ain't nothing but tired?"

"He snaps me up yet like he was a turtle and me his worst enemy! For what should I worry myself? For my part, I don't care. I only say, Abie, if there's anything hurts you—you know how poor papa started to complain just one night like this how he fussed at me when I wanted the doctor. If there's anything hurts you—"

"There ain't, mamma."

"Come in and let me fix the sofa for you. I only say when you close the store early there's something wrong. That Miss Ruby should go off yet—vacation she has to have—a girl like that, with her satin shoes and all—comes into the store at nine o'clock 'cause she runs to the picture shows all night! Yetta Washeim seen her. Vacation yet she has to have! Twenty years I spent with poor papa in the store, and no vacation did I have. Lay down, Abie."

"All right, then," said Mr. Ginsburg, as if duty were a geological eon, and throwing himself across the flowered velvet lounge in the parlor. "I'll lay down if it suits you better."

Mr. Ginsburg was of a cut that never appears on a classy clothes advertisement or in the silver frame on the bird's-eye maple dressing-table of sweet sixteen or more; he belonged to the less ornamented but not unimportant stratum that manufactures the classy clothes by the hundred thousand, and eventually develops into husbands and sponsors for full-length double-breasted sealskin coats for the sweet sixteens and more.

He was as tall as Napoleon, with a round, un-Napoleonic head, close-shaved so that his short-nap hair grew tight like moss on a rock, and a beard that defied every hirsute precaution by pricking darkly through the lower half of his face as phenomenally as the first grass-blades of spring push out in an hour.

"Let me fix you a little something, Abie. I got grand broth in the ice-box—all I need to do is to heat it."

"Ain't I told you I ain't hungry, mamma?"

"When that boy don't eat he's sick. I should worry yet! Poor papa! If he'd listened to me he'd be living to-day. I'm your worst enemy—I am! I work against my own child—that's the thanks what I get."

Sappho, who never wore a gingham wrapper and whose throat was unwrinkled and full of music, never sang more surely than did Mrs. Ginsburg into the heart-cells of her son. He reached out for her wrapper and drew her to him.

"Aw, mamma, you know I don't mean nothing; just when you get all worried over nothing it makes me mad. Come, sit down by me."

"To-night we don't go up to Washeims'. I care a lot for Yetta's talk—her Beulah this and her Beulah that! It makes me sick!"

"I'll take you up, mamma, if you want to go."

"Indeed, you stay where you are! For their front steps and refreshments I don't need to ride in the Subway to Harlem anyway."

"What's the difference? A little evening's pleasure won't hurt you, mamma."

"Such a lunch as she served last time! I got better right now in my ice-box, and I ain't expecting company. They can buy and sell us, too, I guess. Sol Washeim don't take a nine-room house when boys' pants ain't booming—but such a lunch as she served! You can believe me, I wouldn't have the nerve to. Abie, I see Herschey's got fall cloth-tops in their windows already."

"Yes?"

"Good business to-day—not, Abie?—and such heat too! Mrs. Abrahams called across the hallway just now that she was in for a pair; but you was so busy with a customer she couldn't wait—that little pink-haired clerk, with her extravagant ways, had to go off and leave you in the heat! Shoe-buttoners she puts in every box like they cost nothing. I told her so last week, too."

"She's a grand little clerk, mamma—such a business head I never seen!"

"Like I couldn't have come down and helped you to-day! Believe me—when I was in the store with papa, Abie, we wasn't so up-to-date; but none of 'em got away."

"I should know when Mrs. Abrahams wants shoes—five times a week she comes in to be sociable."

"I used to say to papa: 'Always leave a customer to go take a new one's shoes off; and then go back and take your time! Two customers in their stockinged feet is worth more than one in a new pair of shoes!' Abie, you don't look right. You'll tell me the truth if you don't feel well, won't you? I always say to have the doctor in time saves nine. If poor papa had listened to me—"

"I'm all right, mamma. Why don't you sit down by me? Don't light the gas—for why should you make it hotter? Come, sit down by me."

"I go put the oven light out. Apple-pie I was baking for you yet; for myself I don't need supper—I had coffee at five o'clock."

Dusk entered the little apartment and crowded the furniture into phantoms; a red signal light from the skeleton of the elevated road threw a glow as mellow as firelight across the mantelpiece. Mrs. Ginsburg's canary rustled himself until he swelled up twice too fat and performed the ever-amazing ritual of thrusting his head within himself as if he would prey on his own vitals. The cooler breath of night; the smells of neighboring food; the more frequent rushing of trains, and a navy-blue sky, pit-marked with small stars, came all at once. In the hallway Mrs. Ginsburg worked the hook of the telephone impatiently up and down.

"Audubon 6879! Hello! Washeims' residence? Yetta? Yes, this is Carrie. Ain't it awful? I'm nearly dead with it. Yetta, Abie ain't feeling so well; so we won't be up to-night. No—it ain't nothing but the heat; but I worry enough, I can tell you."

"Mamma, don't holler in the telephone so—she can't hear you when you scream."

"It's always something, ain't it? That's what I tell him; but he's like his poor papa before him—he's afraid no one can do nothing but him; his little snip of a clerk he gives a vacation, but none for himself. I'm glad we ain't going then; you always make yourself so much trouble. It's too hot to eat, Abie says. Beef with horseradish sauce I had for supper, too—and apple-pie I baked in the heat for him; but not a bite will that boy eat! And when he don't eat I know he ain't feeling well. Who? Beulah? Ain't that grand? Yes, cooking is always good for a girl to know even if she don't need it. No; I go to work and thicken my gravy with flour and horseradish. Believe me, I cried enough when I did it! Ach, Yetta, why should I leave that boy? You can believe me when I tell you that not one night except when he was took in at the lodge—not one night since poor papa died—has that boy left me at home alone. Not one step will he take without me."

"Aw, mamma!"

"Sometimes I say, 'Abie, go out like other boys and see the girls.' But he thinks if he ain't home to fix the windows and the covers for my rheumatism it ain't right. Yes; believe me, when your children ain't feeling well it's worry enough."

"Aw, maw, I can take you up to the Washeims' if you want to go."

"You ought to hear him in there, Yetta—fussing because I want to keep him laying down. Yes, I go with you; to-morrow at nine I meet you down by Fulton Street. Up round here they're forty-two cents. Ain't it so? And I used two whites and a yolk in my pie-dough. Yes; I hope so too. If not I call a doctor. Nine o'clock! Good-by, Yetta."

"Maw, for me you shouldn't stay home."

Mrs. Ginsburg flopped into a rocker beside the flowered velvet couch.

"A little broth, Abie?"

"No."

"When you don't eat it's something wrong."

"You needn't fan me, mamma—I ain't hot now."

Insidious darkness crept into the room like a cool hand descending on the feverish brow of day; the red glow shifted farther along the mantel and lay vivid as blood across the blue vase and the photograph of a grizzled head in a seashell frame. Mrs. Ginsburg rocked over a loose board in the floor and waved a palm-leaf fan toward the reclining shadow of her son until he could taste its tape-bound edge.

"Next week to-night five years since we lost poor papa, Abie—five years! Gott! When I think of it! Just like his picture he looked up to the last, too—just like his picture."

"Yes, mamma."

"I ain't so spry as I used to be, neither, Abie—or, believe me, I would never let you take on a clerk. Sometimes I think, when the rheumatism gets up round my heart, it won't be long as I go too. Poor papa! If I could have gone with him! How he always hated to go alone to places! To the barber he hated to go, till I got so I could cut it myself."

"Mamma, you ain't got nothing to worry about."

"I worry enough."

"You can take it as easy as you want to now—I even want we should have a better apartment. We got the best little business between here and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street! If poor papa could see it now he wouldn't know it from five years ago. Poor papa! He wasn't willing to spend on improvements."

"Papa always said you had a good business head on you, Abie; but I ain't one, neither, for funny businesses like a clerk. And what you needed them new glass shoe-stands for when the old ones—"

"Now, mamma, don't begin on that again."

"When I was down in the store papa used to say to me: 'Wait till Abie's grown up, mamma! By how his ears stand out from his head I can tell he's got good business sense.' And to think that so little of you he had in the store—such a man that deserved the best of everything! He had to die just when things might have got easy for him."

"Don't cry, mamma; everything is for the best."

"You're a good boy, Abie. Sometimes I think I stand in your way enough."

"Such talk!"

"Any girl would do well enough for herself to get you. Believe me, Beulah Washeim don't need a new pair of shoes every two weeks for nothing! Her mother thinks I don't notice it—she's always braggin' to me how hard her Beulah is on shoes and what a good customer she makes."

"Beulah Washeim! I don't even know what last she wears—that's how much I think of Beulah Washeim."

"Don't let me stand in your way, Abie. Ain't I often told you, now since you do a grand business and we're all paid up, don't let your old mother stand in your way?"

"Like you could be in my way!"

"Once I said to poor papa, the night we paid the mortgage off and had wine for supper: 'Papa,' I said, 'we're out of debt now—Gott sei Dank!—except one debt we owe to some girl when Abie grows up; and that debt we got to pay with money that won't come from work and struggle and saving; we got to pay that debt with our boy—with blood-money.' Poor papa! Already he was asleep when I said it—half a glass of wine, and he was mussy-headed."

"Yes, yes, mamma."

"A girl like Beulah Washeim I ain't got so much use for neither—with her silk petticoats and silk stockings; but Sol Washeim's got a grand business there, Abie. They don't move in a nine-room house from a four-room apartment for nothing."

"For Beulah's weight in gold I don't want her—the way she looks at me with her eyes and shoots 'em round like I was a three-ringed circus."

"You're right—for money you shouldn't marry neither; only I always say it's just as easy to fall in love with a rich one as a poor one. But I'm the last one to force you. There's Hannah Rosenblatt—a grand, economical girl!"

"Hannah Rosenblatt—a girl that teaches school, she pushes on me. I got to get educated yet!"

Mrs. Ginsburg rocked and fanned rhythmically; her unsubtle lips curled upward with the subtle smile of a zingaro. The placidity of peace on a mountain-top, shade in a dell, and love in a garden crept into her tones.

"I just want you to know I don't stand in your way, Abie. You ain't a child no more; but while I'm here you got so good a home as you want—not?"

"Sure!"

"Girls you can always get—not? Girls nowadays ain't what they used to be neither. I'd like to see a girl do to-day for papa what I did—how I was in the store and kitchen all at once; then we didn't have no satin-shoe clerks! Girls ain't what they used to be; in my day working-girls had no time for fine-smelling cologne-water and—"

"All girls ain't alike, mamma—satin shoes cost no more nowadays as leather. We got a dollar-ninety-eight satin pump, you wouldn't believe it—and such a seller! All girls ain't alike, mamma."

"What you mean, Abie?"

Mr. Ginsburg turned on the couch so that his face was close to the wall, and his voice half lost in the curve of his arm.

"Well, once in a while you come across a girl that ain't—ain't like the rest of 'em. Well, there ought to be girls that ain't like the rest of 'em, oughtn't there?"

Mrs. Ginsburg's rocking and fanning slowed down a bit; a curious moment fell over the little room; a nerve-tingling quiescence that in its pregnant moment can race the mind back over an eternity—a silence that is cold with sweat, like the second when a doctor removes his stethoscope from over a patient's left breast and looks at him with a film of pity glazing his eyes.

"What you mean, Abie? Tell mamma what you mean. I ain't the one to stand in your light." Mrs. Ginsburg's speech clogged in her throat.

"You know you always got a home with me, mamma. You know, no matter what comes, I always got to tuck you in bed at night and fix the windows for you. You know you always got with me the best kind of a home I got to give you. Ain't it?"

His hand crept out and rested lightly—ever so lightly—on his mother's knee.

"Abie, you never talked like this before—I won't stand in your way, Abie. If you can make up your mind, Beulah Washeim or Hannah Rosenblatt, either would be—"

"Aw, mamma, it ain't them."

Mrs. Ginsburg's hand closed tightly over her son's; a train swooped past and created a flurry of warm breeze in the room.

"Who—is—it, Abie? Don't be afraid to tell mamma."

"Why, mamma, it ain't no one! Can't a fellow just talk? You started it, didn't you? I was just talking 'cause you was."

"He scares me yet! No consideration that boy has got for his mother! Abie, a little broth—you ain't got no fever, Abie—your head is cool like ice."

"You ain't had no supper yet, mamma."

"I had coffee at five o'clock; for myself I never worry. I'm glad enough you feel all right. It's eight o'clock, Abie—I go me to bed. To-morrow I go to market with Yetta."

"Aw, mamma, now why for do you—"

"I ain't too proud—such high-toned notions I ain't got. For what I pay forty-two cents for eggs up here when I can get 'em for thirty-eight?"

"Be careful, mamma; don't fall over the chair—you want a light?"

"No. Write me a note for the milkman, Abie, before you go to bed, and leave it out with the bottles—half a pint of double cream I want. I make you cream-potatoes for supper to-morrow. I laid your blue shirt on your bed, Abie—don't go to bed on it. It's the last time I iron it; but once more you can wear it, then I make dust-rags. I ironed it soft like you like."

"Yes, mamma."

"Put the cover on the canary, too, Abie. That night you went to the lodge he chirped and chirped, just like you was lost and he was crying 'cause me and him was lonely."

"Yes, mamma. Wait till I light the gas in your room for you—you'll stumble."

"It's too hot for light; I can see by the Magintys' kitchen light across the air-shaft. What she does in her kitchen so late I don't know—such housekeeping! Yesterday with my own eyes I seen her shake a table-cloth out the window with a hole like my hand in it. She should know what I think of such ways."

Mrs. Ginsburg moved through the gloom, steering carefully round the phantom furniture. From his place on the couch her son could hear her moving about her tiny room adjoining the kitchen. A shoe dropped and, after a satisfying interval, another; the padding of bare feet across a floor; the tink of a china pitcher against its bowl; the slam of a drawer; the rusty squeal of spiral bed-springs under pressure.

"Abie, I'm ready."

When Mr. Ginsburg groped into his mother's room she lay in the casual attitude of sleep, but the yellow patch of light from the shaft fell across her open eyes and gray wisps of hair that lay on her pillow like a sickly aura.

"Good night, Abie. You're a good boy, Abie."

"Good night, mamma. A sheet ain't enough—you got to have the blue-and-white quilt on you, too."

"Don't, Abie—do you want to suffocate me? I can't stand so much. Take off the quilt."

"Your rheumatism, you know, mamma—you'll see how much cooler it will get in the night."

"Ach, Abie, leave that window all the way up. So hot, and that boy closes me up like—"

"When the lace curtain blows in it means you're in a draught, mamma—half-way open you can have it, but not all. Without me to fuss you'd have a fine rheumatism—like it ain't dangerous for you to sleep where there's enough draught to blow the curtain in."