Part 8

The dresser, with its wavy mirror, was strewn with her husband's neckties; an uncorked bottle of bay-rum gave out its last faint fumes.

She opened the first long drawer with a quivering intake of breath and pulled out a shirt-waist, another, and yet another, and a coarse white petticoat with a large-holed embroidery flounce. Then she dragged a suit-case, which was wavy like the mirror, through the blur of her tears, out from under the bed; and while she fumbled with the lock the door behind her opened, and her heart rose in her throat with the sudden velocity of an express elevator shooting up a ten-story shaft.

In the dresser mirror, and without turning her head or gaining her feet, she looked into the eyes of her husband.

"Pussy-cat!" he said, and came toward her with his teeth flashing like Carrara marble in sunlight.

She sprang to her feet and backed against the dresser.

"Don't! Don't you come near me!"

"You don't mean that, Goldie."

She shivered in her scorn.

"Don't you come near me! I came—to get my things."

"Oh!" he said, and tossed his hat on the bed and peeled off his coat. "Help yourself, kiddo. Go as far as you like."

She fell to tearing at the contents of her drawer without discrimination, cramming them into her bag and breathing furiously, like a hare in the torture of the chase. The color sprang out in her cheeks, and her eyes took fire.

Her husband threw himself, in his shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, across the bed and watched her idly. Only her fumbling movements and the sing of the too-high gas broke the silence. He rose, lowered the flame, and lay down again.

Her little box of poor trinkets spilled its contents as she packed it; her hair-brush fell from her trembling fingers and clattered to the floor.

"Can I help you, Goldie-eyes?"

Silence. He coughed rather deep in his chest, and she almost brushed his hand as she passed to the clothes wardrobe. He reached out and caught her wrist.

"Now, Goldie, you—"

"Don't—don't you touch me! Let go!"

He drew her down to the bed beside him.

"Can't you give a fellow another chance, baby? Can't you?" She tugged for her freedom, but his clasp was tight as steel and tender as love. "Can't you, baby?"

"You!" she said, kicking at the sloppy satin slipper at her feet, as if it were a loathsome thing that crawled. "I—I don't ever want to see you again, you—you—"

"You drove me to it, pussy; honest you did!"

"You didn't need no driving. You take to it like a fish to water—nobody can drive you. You just ain't—no—good!"

"You drove me to it. When you quit I just went crazy mad. I kicked the skylight—I tore things wide open. I was that sore for you—honest, baby!"

"I've heard that line of talk before. I ain't forgot the night at Hinkey's. I ain't forgot nothing. You or horses can't hold me here!" She wrenched at her wrists.

"I got a job yesterday, baby. Bill made good. Eighty dollars, honey! Me and Cutty are quits for good. Ain't that something—now, ain't it?"

"Let me go!"

"Pussy-cat!"

"Let me go, I say!"

He coughed and turned on his side toward her.

"You don't mean it."

"I do! I do! Let go! Let go!"

She tore herself free and darted to the wardrobe door. He closed his eyes and his lashes lay low on his cheeks.

"Before you go, Goldie, where's the antiphlogistin? I got a chest on me like an ice-wagon."

"Sure, you have. That's the only time you ever show up before crack of dawn."

He reached out and touched her wrist.

"I'm hot, ain't I?"

She placed a reluctant hand on his brow.

"Fever?"

"It ain't nothing much. I'll be all right."

"It's just one of your spells. Stay in bed a couple of days, and you'll soon be ready for another jamboree!"

"Don't fuss at me, baby."

"It's in the wash-stand drawer in a little tin can. Don't make the plaster too hot."

"Sure, I won't. I'll get along all righty."

She threw a shabby cloth skirt over her arm and a pressed-plush coat that was gray at the elbows and frayed at the hem. He reached out for the dangling empty sleeve as she passed.

"You was married in that coat, wasn't you, hon?"

"Yes," she said, and her lips curled like burning paper; "I was married in that coat."

"Goldie-eyes, you know I can't get along without my petsie; you know it. There ain't no one can hold a candle to you, baby!"

"Yes, yes!"

"There ain't! I wish I was feelin' well enough to tell you how sorry, baby—how sorry a fellow like me can get. I just wish it, baby—baby—"

She surrendered like a reed to the curve of a scythe and crumpled in a contortional heap beside the bed.

"You—you always get me!"

He gathered her up and laid her head backward on his shoulder, so that her face was foreshortened and close to his.

"Goldie-eyes," he said, "I'll make it up to you! I'll make it up to you!" And he made a motion as though to kiss her where the curls lay on her face, but drew back as if sickened.

"Good God!" he said. "Poor little baby!"

Quick as a throb of a heart she turned her left cheek, smooth as a lily petal, to his lips.

"It's all right, Harry!" she said, in a voice that was tight. "I'm crazy, I guess; but, gee, it's great to be crazy!"

"I'll make it up to you, baby. See if I don't! I'll make it up to you."

She kissed him, and his lips were hot and dry.

"Lemme fix your plaster, dearie; you got one of your colds."

"Don't get it too hot, hon."

"Gee! Lemme straighten up. Say, ain't you a messer, though! Look at this here wash-stand and those neckties! Ain't you a messer, though, dearie!"

She crammed the ties into a dresser drawer, dragged a chair into place, removed a small tin can from the wash-stand drawer, hung her hat and jacket on their peg, and lowered the shade.

MARKED DOWN

Along with radium, parcels post, wireless telegraphy, and orchestral church music came tight skirts and the hipless movement.

Adolph Katzenstein placed his figurative ear to the ground, heard the stealthy whisper of soft messalines and clinging charmeuse, and sold out the Empire Shirt-waist Company for twenty-five hundred dollars at a slight loss.

Five years later the Katzenstein Neat-Fit Petticoat was flaunted in the red and white electric lights in the lightest part of Broadway, and the figure of an ecstatic girl in an elastic-top, charmeuse-ruffled petticoat had become as much of an epic in street-car advertising as the flakiest breakfast food or the safest safety razor.

Then the Katzensteins moved from a simplex to a complex apartment, furnished the dining-room in Flemish oak and the bedroom in white mahogany; Mrs. Katzenstein telephoned to her fancy grocer's for artichokes instead of buying cabbages from the street-vender, and Mr. Katzenstein walked with the four fingers of each hand thrust into the distended front pockets of his trousers.

On the first Tuesday of each month Mrs. Katzenstein entertained at whist—an antediluvian survival of a bridgeless era.

At eight o'clock in the morning of one of these first Tuesdays she entered her daughter's white-mahogany bedroom, raised the shades with a clatter, and drew back the curtains.

"Birdie, get up! It's late, and we got house-cleaning this morning. Papa's been gone already an hour."

The pink-and-white flowered comforter on the bed stirred, and two plump arms, with frills of lace falling backward, raised up like sturdy monoliths in the stretch that accompanies a yawn.

"Aw—yaw—yaw—mamma! Can't you let a girl sleep after she's been up late? Tell Tillie she should begin her sweeping in the hall."

"I should know what time you got home last night. You sneak in like you was afraid it would give me some pleasure to wake up and hear about it! Who was there? What did Marcus have to say?"

"Aw, mamma, let me sleep—can't you? I'll get up in a minute."

"So close-mouthed she is—goes to the party with a grand boy like Marcus and comes home like she was muzzled! Nothing to say! If I was out with a young man so often I could talk."

"Please, mamma, pull down the shade."

"'Please, mamma, pull down the shade!'" mimicked Mrs. Katzenstein, in a high falsetto. "After I rush round all day yesterday for the pink wreath for her hair, that's what I hear the next morning—that's the thanks I get!"

Birdie pulled the comforter up closer about her ears, and the head on the rumpled pillow burrowed deeper.

"And such laziness! I been up two hours with my Kuechen and cheese-pie fixed already for this afternoon, and my daughter sleeps like a lady! The man that gets her I don't envy!"

The pink-and-white mound on the bed heaved like a ship at sea.

"In a minute, mamma!"

Mrs. Katzenstein jerked up a filmy gown from across the back of a chair and held it from her at arm's-length.

"Anybody's too good for a girl that ain't got no order! I wonder what Marcus Gump would say if he knew how you treat your things? Her good pink dress that I paid twenty dollars for the making alone she throws round like it cost nothing! Sack-cloth is too good! I don't put it away—you can wait on yourself."

However, as she spoke Mrs. Katzenstein folded the pink gown, with an avalanche of lace flowing from the bodice, lengthwise in a drawer and smothered it with tissue-paper.

"That a girl like that shouldn't be ashamed to let her poor old mother wait on her!"

"I'd put it away, mamma, if you'd just give me time."

"Tuesday, when I have the ladies and my card party, she sleeps! No consideration that girl has got for her mother!"

Birdie swung herself to the side of the bed; her wealth of crow-blue hair fell over her shoulders; sleep trembled on her lashes.

"I'm up, ain't I? Now are you satisfied?"

"For all the help you are to me you might as well stay in bed the rest of the morning. A girl that can come home from a party and have nothing to say! But for my part I don't want to know. I guess they had a big blow-out, didn't they?"

Birdie, high-chested as Juno, with wide, firm shoulders that sloped as must have sloped the shoulders of Artemis when they tempted Actaeon, coiled her hair before the mirror with the gesture that has belonged to women since first they coiled their hair. Her cheeks, fleshly but fruit-like in their freshness, might have belonged to a buxom nymph of the grove.

"I wish you could have seen the spread Jeanette had, mamma! I brought home the recipe for her lobster chops. I'll bet if she had one she had six different kinds of ice-cream."

With one swoop Mrs. Katzenstein flung the snowy avalanche of pillows and sheets over the footboard of the bed and opened wide both the windows.

"Tillie," she cried, "bring me the broom. I'll start in Miss Birdie's room while you finish the breakfast dishes."

"Such an affair as she had! I said to Marcus, on the way home, it could have been at Delmonico's and not have been finer."

"You don't say so! Such is life, ain't it? We knew Simon Lefkowitz when he used to come to papa and buy for his stock six shirt-waists at a time. Then they didn't live in no eighty-dollar apartment. Many's the morning I used to meet the old lady at market. Who else was there?"

"Who? Let me see! Gertie Glauber was there. She had on that dress Laevitt made; and, believe me, I liked mine better. Tekla Stein and Morris Adler—you know those Adlers in the millinery business?"

"Nice people!"

"You couldn't get a pin between Tekla and him—honest, how that girl worked for him! Selma Blumenthal was there, too, and I must say she looked grand—those eyes of hers and that figure! But what those fellows can see in her so much I don't know. Honest, mamma, she's such a dumbhead she can't talk ten words to a boy."

"Girls don't need so much brains. I always say it scares the men off. Look at Gussie Graudenheimer—high school she had to have yet! What good does it do? Not a thing does that girl have—and her mother worries enough about it, too."

"That's what Marcus says about her—he says she's too smart for him; he says he'd rather have a girl nice and sweet than too smart."

Mrs. Katzenstein leaned her broom in a corner, daubed at the mantelpiece with a flannel cloth, and regarded her daughter surreptitiously through the mirror.

"You had a nice time with Marcus last night? You've been out with him five times and still have nothing to say."

"What's there to say, mamma? He's a fine boy and shows a girl a grand time. Last night it was sleeting just a little, and he had to have a taxi-cab. Honest, it was a shame for the money! Take it from me, Morris Adler walked Tekla. I saw them going to the Subway."

"Well, what's what? Is that the end of it?"

"Aw, mamma, how should I know? I can't read a fellow's mind! All I know is he—he's coming over to-night."

"Don't you bother with putting those slippers away, Birdie; you just lie round and take it easy this morning. When a girl's going to have company in the evening she should rest up—me and Tillie can do this little work."

Birdie wrapped herself in a crimson kimono plentifully splotched with large pink and blue and red and green chrysanthemums and snuggled into a white wicker rocking-chair. Her lips, warmly curved like a child's, were parted in a smile.

"I don't want breakfast," she announced. "Irma Friedman quit it and lost five pounds in two weeks."

"Papa and me were saying last night, Birdie, we aren't in a hurry to get rid of you; but such a young man as Marcus Gump any girl can be lucky to get. Aunt Batta said she heard for sure Loeb Brothers are going to make him manager of their new factory—think once, manager and three thousand a year!—just double his salary! Think of putting a young man like him in that big Newark factory!"

"It's surely grand; but for what does it have to be in a place like Newark?"

"Papa says that boy put March Hare boys' pants on the market for the Loebs. How grand for his mother and all, her a widow, to have such a son! Wasn't I right to invite her this afternoon?"

"I'm the last one to say a word against Marcus. You ought to heard them last night talking on the side about him and his new position he might get—just grand! Jeanette's got a new stitch, mamma. It's not like eyelet or French, but sort of between the two, and grand for centerpieces. I could embroider a dresser-cover in a week."

"I thought I'd have sardines this afternoon instead of cold tongue. For why should I make Mrs. Cohen feel bad that we don't buy at their delicatessen?"

"I'll fix the cut-glass bowl with fruit for the center of the table."

"It's like papa and me said last night, Birdie—a girl makes no mistake when she follows her parents' advice. Marcus Gump's own mother told me when I was introduced to her at Hirsch's yesterday afternoon, you're the first girl he ever took out more than two or three times."

Birdie snuggled deeper in her chair and stretched her arms with the gesture of Aurora greeting the day.

"Mamma," she said, softly, "what do you think he—he said I looked like last night?"

"What?"

"He said—he said—"

Mrs. Katzenstein paused in her dusting.

"He—said—Aw, mamma, I can't go telling it—so silly it sounds."

"Ach! For nonsense I got no time—such silliness for two grown-up children! That gets you nowhere. Plain talking is what does it."

But suddenly the thridding and thudding of Mrs. Katzenstein's machinations died down. It was as if a steamboat had turned off its power and drifted quietly into its slip. She tiptoed to the table and straightened the cover, arranged the shades until they were precisely even one with the other, gave the new-made bed a final pat, and tiptoed to the door.

"I forgot to order my finger-rolls for this afternoon," she said.

At two o'clock guests began to arrive. A heavy sleet clattered against the windows; the sky and the apartment houses across the way were shrouded in cold gray. Birdie drew the shades and tweaked on the electric lights; tables were grouped about the parlor, laid out with decks of cards, pencils and paper, and small glass dishes of candies.

Mother and daughter had emerged from the morning like moths out of a chrysalis. Mrs. Katzenstein's black crepe-de-Chine, with cut-jet trimmings, trailed after her when she walked. She greeted her guests with effulgence and enthusiasm.

"Come right in, Carrie! Tillie, take Mrs. Ginsburg's umbrella. I bet you got your winning clothes on to-day, Carrie; I can always tell it when you wear your willow plume and furs."

Carrie Ginsburg flopped a remonstrating and loose-wristed hand at Mrs. Katzenstein.

"Go 'way! That glass pickle-dish I won at Silverman's three weeks ago is the last luck I had. Your mamma's the winner—ain't she, Birdie? At my house she always carries off the prize. I bet I helped furnish her china-closet."

"You should worry, Mrs. Ginsburg, when your husband owns the Cut-Glass Palace!"

"You can believe me or not, Birdie, but Aaron's that particular if I take so much as a pin-tray out of stock he charges it up! When you get such an honest husband it's almost as bad as the other way. He don't get thanks for it."

"Birdie, take Mrs. Ginsburg in the middle room and help off with her things. Hello, Mrs. Silverman! You're a sight for sore eyes. Why wasn't you down at the Ladies' Auxiliary on Wednesday? It was grand! Doctor Lippman spoke so beautiful, and there was coffee in the Sunday-school rooms after."

Mrs. Silverman deposited a large and elaborate muff on the table and unbuttoned her full-length fur coat.

"Such a day as it was Wednesday! Even to-day my Meena begged me not to come out. 'Mamma,' she said, 'to go out in such sleet and rain for a card party—it's a shame!' Then my Louis telephoned up from the store that if I went out I should take a cab. What that boy don't think of!"

"He's a fine boy, Mrs. Silverman; and such a sweet girl he married."

"It ain't for the money, Mrs. Katzenstein—believe me, it ain't; but why should I take a cab when it's only one block away to the Subway? I leave that to my children. Meena's the stylish one of our family—when it so much as sprinkles that girl has to have a cab."

"Come right in, Mrs. Gump; I knew you wouldn't be afraid of a little weather. Here, let me take your umbrella."

"It's a fine weather for ducks, Mrs. Katzenstein."

"Just you go right in the middle room with Birdie and make yourself at home."

"Come right with me, Mrs. Gump; me and mamma was so afraid maybe you wouldn't come."

Birdie flitted in and out from parlor to bedroom; the languor of the morning had fallen from her.

"Now, mamma, you and the ladies sit down at your tables. That's right, Mrs. Mince—you and Mrs. Kronfeldt play opposites, and Mrs. Ginsburg and Aunt Batta. Don't get excited, mamma. I'll fix the ladies in their places. Here, Mrs. Weissenheimer, you sit here between Mrs. Gump and mamma."

"Look at that goil!" exclaimed Mrs. Mince, seating herself and taking a pinch of Birdie's firmly molded arm between thumb and forefinger. "I wish you'd look how thin she's got. Ain't that grand, though! I bet you don't drink water with your meals?"

"Not a drop, Mrs. Mince; and no starchy food; no—"

"Mrs. Mince," interrupted Mrs. Ginsburg, dealing the cards with skill and rapidity, "Doctor Adelberg told my sister-in-law that rolling on the floor two hundred times morning and night had got this diet business beat. All he says you got to be careful about is no water at meals. But with me it's like Aaron says—I keep him busy filling up my glass at the table."

"I wish you'd see my Birdie diet, Carrie! The grandest things she won't eat! Last night for supper we had potato Pfannkuechen, that would melt in your mouth. Not one will she touch! Her papa says how she lives he don't know."