Part 13

"She should say good-by to me only if she wants to. Izzy, when you go out the gate drive back that rooster--I'll wring his little gallivantin' neck if he don't stop roosting in that bush!"

"Good night, children; take good care of the cars."

"Good night, mamma...papa."

The gate clicked shut, and the two figures moved into the mist of growing gloom; over their heads the trees met and formed across the brick sidewalk a roof as softly dark as the ceiling of a church. Birds chirped.

Mrs. Binswanger leaned her wide, uncorseted figure against a pillar and watched them until a curve in the avenue cut her view, then she dragged a low wicker rocker across the veranda.

"We can sit out on the porch a while yet, Julius. Not like midsummer it is for your rheumatism."

"Ya, ya. My slippers, Becky."

"Here."

"Ya, ya."

"Look across the yard, will you, Julius. The Schlossmans are still at the supper-table. Fruit gelatin they got. I seen it cooling on the fence. We got new apples on the side-yard tree, you wouldn't believe, Julius. To-morrow I make pies."

"Ya, ya."

The light tulle of early evening hung like a veil, and through it the sad fragrance of burning leaves, which is autumn's incense, drifted from an adjoining lawn.

"'Sh-h-h-h, chickey--sh-h-h-h! Back in the yard I can't keep that rooster, Julius. And to-day for thirty cents I had that paling in the garden fence fixed, too. Honest, to keep a yard like ours going is an expense all the time. People in the city without yards is lucky."

"In all Newton there ain't one like ours. Look, Becky, at that white-rose bush flowering so late just like she was a bride."

"When Izzy was home always, we didn't have the expense of weeding."

"Now when he comes home all he does is change neckties and make trouble."

"_Ach_, my moon vines! Don't get your chair so close, Julius. Look how those white flowers open right in your face. One by one like big stars coming out."

"M-m-m-m and smell, Becky, how good!"

"Here, lemme pull them heavy shoes off for you, papa. Listen, there goes that oriole up in the cherry-tree again. Listen to the thrills he's got in him. Pull, Julius; I ain't no derrick!"

"Ah-h-h, how good it feels to get 'em off! Now light my pipe, Becky. Always when you light it, better it tastes. Hold--there--make out of your hand a cup--there--pu-pu-pu--there! Now sit down by me, Becky!"

"Move over."

"_Ach_, Becky, when we got our little home like this, with a yard so smooth as my hand, where we don't need shoes or collars, and with our own fruit right under our noses, for why ain't you satisfied?"

"For myself, Julius, believe me it's too good, but for Poil we--"

"Look all what you can see right here from our porch! Look there through the trees at the river; right in front of our eyes it bends for us. Look what a street we live on. We should worry it ain't in the booming part. Quiet like a temple, with trees on it older as you and me together."

"The caterpillars is bad this year, Julius; trees ain't so cheap, neither. In the city such worries they ain't got."

"For what with a place like this, Becky, with running water and--"

"It's Poil, Julius. Not a thing a beau-ti-fool girl like Poil has out here."

"Nonsense. It's a sin she should want a better place as this. Ain't she got a plush parlor and a piano and--"

"It's like Izzy says, Julius: there's too many fine goils in the city for the boys to come out here on a forty-five-minute ride. What boys has she got out here, Mike Donnely and--"

"_Ach!_"

"That's what we need; just something like that should happen to us. But, believe me, it's happened before when a girl ain't got no better to pick from. How I worry about it you should know."

"Becky, with even such talk you make me sick."

"Mark my word, it's happened before, Julius! That's why I say, Julius, a few months in the city this winter and she could meet the right young man. Take a boy like Max Teitlebaum. Yourself you said how grand and steady he is. Twice with Izzy he's been out here, and not once his eyes off Poil did he take."

"Teitlebaum, with a store twice so big as ours on Sixth Avenue, don't need to look for us--twice they can buy and sell us."

"Is--that--so! To me that makes not one difference. Put Poil in the city, where it don't take an hour to get to be, and, _ach_, almost anything could happen! Not once did he take his eyes off her--such a grand, quiet boy, too."

"When a young man's got thoughts, forty-five minutes' street-car ride don't keep him away."

"Nonsense! I always say I never feel hungry till I see in front of me a good meal. If I have to get dressed and go out and market for it I don't want it. It's the same with marriage. You got to work up in the young man the appetite. What they don't see they don't get hungry for. They got to get eyes bigger as their stomachs first."

"Such talk makes me sick. Suppose she don't get married, ain't she got a good home and--"

"An old maid you want yet! A beau-ti-fool goil like our Poil he wants to make out of her an old maid, or she should break her parents' hearts with a match like Mike Donnely--"

"Becky."

"Aw, Julius, now we got the chance to rent for three months. Say we live them three months at the Wellington Hotel. Say it costs us a little more; everybody always says what a grand provider you are, Julius; let them say a little more, Julius."

"I--I ain't got the money, Becky, I tell you. For me to refuse what you want is like I stick a knife in my heart, but I got poor business, Becky."

"Maybe in the end, Julius, it's the cheapest thing we ever done."

"I can't afford it, Becky."

"For only three months we can go, Julius."

"I got notes, Becky, notes already twice extended. If I don't meet in March God knows where--"

"Ya, ya, Julius; all that talk I know by heart!"

"I ain't getting no younger neither, Becky. Hardly through the insurance examination I could get. I ain't so strong no more. When I get big worries I don't sleep so good. I ain't so well nights, Becky."

"Always the imagination sickness, Julius."

"I ain't so well, I tell you, Becky."

"Last time when all you had was the neuralgia, and you came home from the store like you was dying, Dr. Ellenburg told me hisself right here on this porch that never did he know a man so nervous of dying like you."

"I can't help it, Becky."

"If I was so afraid like you of dying, Julius, not one meal could I enjoy. A healthy man like you with nothing but the rheumatism and a little asthma. Only last week you came home pale like a ghost with a pain in your side, when it wasn't nothing but where your pipe burnt a hole in your pants pocket to give me some more mending to do."

"Just for five minutes you should have felt that pain!"

"Honest, Julius, to be a coward like you for dying it ain't nice--honest, it ain't."

"Always, Becky, when I think I ain't always going to be with you and the children such a feeling comes over me."

"_Ach_, Julius, be quiet! Without you I might just as well be dead, too."

"I'm getting old, Becky; sixty-six ain't no spring chicken no more."

"That's right, Julius; stick knives in me."

"Life is short, Becky; we must be happy while we got each other."

"Life _is_ short, Julius, and for our children we should do all what we can. We can't always be with them, Julius. We--we must do the right thing by 'em. Like you say we--we're getting old--together, Julius. We don't want nothing to reproach ourselves with."

"Ya, ya, Becky."

Darkness fell thickly, like blue velvet portieres swinging together, and stars sprang out in a clear sky.

They rocked in silence, their heads touching. The gray cat, with eyes like opals, sprang into the hollow of Mr. Binswanger's arm.

"Billy, you come to sit by mamma and me? Ni-ce Bil-ly!"

"We go in now, papa; in the damp you get rheumatism."

"Ya, ya, Becky--hear how he purrs, like an engine."

"Come on, papa; damper every minute it gets."

He rose with his rheumatic jerkiness, placed the cat gently on all fours on the floor, and closed his fingers around the curve of his wife's outstretched arm.

"When--when we go--go to the city, Becky, we don't sublet Billy; we--we take him with us, not, Becky?"

"Yes, papa."

"Ya, ya, Becky."

* * * * *

The chief sponsors for the family hotel are neurasthenia and bridge whist, the inability of the homemaker and the debility of the housekeeper.

Under these invasions Hestia turns out the gas-logs, pastes a To Let sign on the windows, locks the front door behind her, and gives the key to the auctioneer.

The family holds out the dining-room clock and a pair of silver 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.