Part 7

The Wallenstein living room overlooked the heads of the buildings opposite and took in a fleeting view of Central Park with an etching of tree, a pagoda on a rock, and a round of lake with a swan boat floating upon it. A showy room of the shiny, overstuffed leather furniture of the period. Velour hangings with tassels. A handsome baby grand piano and a lamp with an openwork brass shade. Paintings in shadow boxes and, incongruously enough, to fill in the narrow panel of wall between the mantelpiece and door, a few Japanese prints which Mr. Wallenstein had once been obliged to take over as part payment of a bad account. Cool and thin with the fine calligraphy of a minute and apparently emotionless art. Bare-legged coolies full of little running steps. The span of many bridges. A plum tree, botanically wrong. A peacock, ornithologically wrong. Slant faces hung on like masks. Bertha liked to dust their impassiveness.

Evenings when there was not a poker party around the dining-room table, the Wallensteins lounged about this room in loose unexcited attitudes. Mr. Wallenstein reading the paper and yawning enormously with protracted shudderings as he turned the pages. He was a tall, heavy-set fellow, with very black hair parted down the center and set on to his head squarely, like a toupee. His small, straight mustache with the ends waxed up enhanced this squareness. When he stretched out in his long hypothenuse and hoisted the newspaper, he littered the entire center of the room, and to pass him, one had to climb.

Mrs. Wallenstein, on these evenings when there was no poker game, uncorseted herself immediately after dinner, the soft white flesh running down the hill of her body. She was very blonde, and wore her hair in an elaborate tier upon tier of puffs. These puffs, made in rows of three, four, and five, like hot buns, cluttered the house. So much as open a drawer and one crawled out at you and wound itself around your fingers in a webby, highly unpleasant fashion. Once Mr. Wallenstein slid into a row of them that had somehow dropped into his shoe, and forthwith had the noisy horrors.

Whenever old Mrs. Wallenstein found one, she picked it up gingerly, as if it were a mouse by the tail, and handed it in a scathing kind of silence to her daughter-in-law.

"Pfui!" was how she felt about most things pertaining to her son's wife. But she sat, too, in the living room with the pair of them after dinner. There was an arch of shadow where the lamplight did not reach. Old Mrs. Wallenstein liked to sit back in that, idle and brooding and with dry old eyes like prunes.

She had to have a hassock, because her feet did not touch the floor. Young Mrs. Wallenstein had a way of kicking the hassock savagely when her mother-in-law was not about, gritting her teeth with pain at her stubbed toes and taking a fierce kind of delight in that pain, and then kicking it again and again with her fancy tipped shoes.

Young Mrs. Wallenstein's shoes were eloquent. They were short-vamped, florid, and after even one wearing apt to tipple a little of run-over heels. Bertha was constantly at them with polish and cleaning fluids and vaseline for the patent leather. There was one pair of very high-heeled, slightly lop-sided champagne-colored ones with black jigsaw trimming. Mrs. Wallenstein never failed with her "pfui" when she passed them, smelling of cleaning fluid and drying crookedly on the window sill. There was something suggestive of blondely loose fat about their short vamps and run-over heels.

Old Mrs. Wallenstein wore square-toed, black bluchers with rubber insets, which she polished herself every morning and set on the fire escape outside Bertha's window to dry.

Her son, who was inclined to bunions, wore square toes too, but with the additional flourish of spats with the green or ruby of vivid hose above them.

Underneath the dining room table, their respective feet spoke volumes. The polished orthodox ones of old Mrs. Wallenstein on their hassock. The short-vamp, champagne ones. Wallenstein's rather stolid ones between the two.

Difficult, nervous meals of three kinds of silences. An old lady's aching one. A young woman's high-tensioned one. Wallenstein's tired one.

Sometimes it seemed to Bertha that the dining room of golden oak and swell of elaborate sideboard was filled with a gale of this silence, like one of those terrific arctic windstorms that old sea dogs dread because the water, in horrible phenomena, lies like glass under the gale too wind-beaten to lift a wave.

"Pass me the butter, Wally." Scarcely the phraseology to rock empires, and yet, when May Wallenstein said it, old Mrs. Wallenstein, whose skin was sapless at best, could seem to shrivel into the ancient parchment of the Torah.

She kept kosher. Valiantly. The forbidden combination of meat and butter might desecrate her daughter-in-law's board, but not the spirit nor the palate of the old lady. At her end of the table the sacred rituals of the "_fleischig_" and "_milchig_" remained unviolated. There was a shelf in the kitchen, especially contrived by her son, for the kosher utensils and a two-burner gas-stove in the corner for the personal and private preparation of her orthodox foods.

May hated that stove and the little whisper of garlic that hung above it.

"Makes me sick to my stummick to walk into my own kitchen" was her frequent _sotto voce_. "I'm Episcopalian, but I'd like to see myself frying myself Episcopalian pork chops. Good to their stummicks! Oh, Lord! Kosher is another word for stummick-love."

And Bertha, hearing, would clatter pans and turn on the spigot for the plunge of water into the sink, because sometimes the undertones percolated to the old woman's dim ears and then she had one of her smothering spells and spirits of ammonia had to be administered. On one occasion, Mr. Wallenstein, in the midst of a Monday marked-down sale of Oxford-ties had to be sent for, and all through the rush hours was obliged to sit alternating between holding his mother's hand in her darkened bedroom and pacifying his wife, who invariably expressed her frenzy by throwing articles of clothing into a traveling bag and then strewing them all out again. It kept Bertha on the jump, what with the hot water bag for the old lady's numb feet and picking up the young one's distracted articles of finery.

"No. I won't be the one to go. Why should I? That's just what she's laying for, to break up this house. But she won't! Not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks!"

The last was a favorite aphorism of Mrs. Wallenstein. You could hear it from the poker table:

"I'll raise you two bones. You can't bluff me. Not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks." Or over the telephone to her sister, who clerked in the Sample Shoe Store: "Tell Wally his mother is fixing him one of his sweet-sour messes for his supper and to stop by and bring me home a couple of chops for mine. I wouldn't eat anything sweet and sour for no man. No siree, not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks!"

A gay painted phrase like the little pagoda all lantern-hung in one of the Japanese prints. Bertha liked it. Button up the back with tiddlywinks! To be sure, May didn't button up that way at all, but with much holding in at the waist and reddening of the face, and exclamations like "Ouch, watch out, let me straighten my shields first. A little elbow grease will help."

The fastenings were usually blobby velvet ones or hooks that strained at their moorings.

To button up the back with tiddlywinks was to be gay as a striped tent. It made Bertha feel gay somehow, just to repeat it to herself; as gay as the day the river ran ahead of the furniture van to show them the way to the grove.

But, generally, there was little enough to feel gay about at the Wallensteins, with May and her tantrums so quick on the trigger, or the broody old woman who on Friday evenings would light the candles in her room and keep open her door so that the sound of her weeping came in little bleatings down the hallway.

"She's putting on, putting on," May would sing-song, as she lolled _en déshabillé_ in the living room. She had a perpetually hoarse voice, full of fog. "When I feel like having a good cry, I go in my room and shut the door, and God knows there's enough reasons around here for having a good cry. Evening's diversion. God, how they love to cry. It's a wonder there's not an Atlantic Ocean somewheres made up of noisy kosher tears."

"I wish you'd leave my mother out of your gab, May."

"Oh, you do, do you? Well then, I wish she'd leave her gab out of my business!"

"Between you and your rows you two women are driving me plumb raving crazy. At least if I was the youngest I'd give in to an old woman--like my mother with only a few years left to live. I'd humor her, May. Honest I would."

"Few years. Long enough to have ruined my home for years! Few years! With her digestion for the greasy meals she eats, she stands a good chance of ruining it for many years to come."

"I won't stand hearing my mother talked about in language that's only fit for a bar-room. This isn't the Bowery. It's supposed to be a home where a man who's been on his feet all day can get a minute's peace."

"What about me? Am I entitled to a little peace in my own home, too? That old woman is driving me crazy. I can't get no friends to come to the house no more the way she sits out in the next room yammering to herself--I won't turn kosher for nobody's old woman. You married me for what I was and my Episcopalian hide is as precious to me as her kosher one! This isn't a home. It's a hell-house."

"May, you can't change a leopard's spots. My mother's old, and she's grieving herself to death over things you're too young to understand. She likes you, May."

"A lot I care if she likes me or not. Nobody could live in the house with her. The dusting don't suit and the cooking don't suit and the poker parties don't suit and the number of petticoats I have in the wash don't suit. Bertha is the first servant we've ever been able to keep in the same house with your mother and if that big lummox is human I'll button my dress up the back with tiddlywinks...."

"She's the best servant we ever had."

"Yes, but nobody but a great, cream-colored elephant like her would stand for the old woman's butting in. She's got a hide not even your mother can break through. That's the way to be. Tough, so that they can stick things in you and you don't feel 'em. I'm sensitive. That's me. High-strung. I can't stand no yammering old hex in my affairs, and not get the jimjams."

"You eat those words that you just called my mother."

"Eat 'em? I'll spit 'em out, you mean! Hex--that's what she is. Hex!"

"By God--"

"All right, hit me! Hit me! Lots I care--go in there and cry some kosher tears with her--I can't help it because your father died--I can't help it because garlic makes me sick to my stummick--I can't help it because a penny don't look the size of a sunrise to me--hit me--hit me--but if you do, there'll be the greatest little smash-up around here this happy home has ever known--hit me--I'd like to see you try it, Sheenie!"

"By God--you--"

"Ah--ow--"

Then, to Bertha shuddering in the kitchen, the tormented frenzied tumble of him down the hallway, the slam into his room and presently the horrid distressed sounds of the violent sickness which these scenes never failed to induce in him.

Silence, with May lying swollen and wet-mouthed on the couch, and the bleating from the old woman's room whimpering down into sobs.

Virtually, it was Bertha who put the family to bed. Additional blankets to be laid out. Pillows fluffed. The hot water bag for the old woman's chilled spine. Ice for Wallenstein to suck. Spirits of camphor for the threat of fever sore on May's swollen lips.

Yes, generally there was little enough to be glad about at the Wallensteins.

***

In spring Bertha wheeled the old lady out in her rolling chair. She had a hip-bone complaint and except in the house, seldom walked. Bertha liked wheeling her out in the spring.

Usually because the up and down curbs were difficult, she trundled her directly to the park.

There was a tree there beside the lake with the swan-boats on it, that in April popped out in a delicate rash of leaves. It was down eight steps hewn out of a natural rock, and sometimes old Mrs. Wallenstein squealed at the tilt of the chair, but once down, there was quite a little dell, and a bench beside the water so that when one of the swan-boats moved the water ran up almost to the small front wheels of the chair and then backed off again.

Long, sedative afternoons with the old woman droning into them and Bertha, her hand joggling chair as if it were a perambulator, watching the light bend around the lake. In repose the look of tightness could seem to ease up in Mrs. Wallenstein's face like the flesh of a prune that has been dropped in water.

Faces like hers, strong-skinned, high-boned, and the eyes a little fanatical with love, had kept the storm-blown flames of the seven-branch candlestick burning down through the ages.

When Mrs. Wallenstein wept for her son she wept for Israel, and that is why her eyes could sometimes seem dry as salt beds with bitter residuum.

Often, talking through the quiet afternoon, her lips would try to shape themselves for words too heart-twisting for her to endure to speak and so she would cry them, her mouth writhing back from the gums.

"My boy. I don't care, Berthie, so much that she has stolen him from me, every mother who loses a son to a wife must learn such pain, but Berthie--she's stolen him from his faith--ain't that an awful pain, Berthie, to have a son stolen like a baby from his cradle out of his religion? Away from his God--to hers."

Here was that God business again. God--drenched in Light. Why was Mrs. Wallenstein's God a better God than May's God? Why was not the God who made May, the same God who made Mrs. Wallenstein and Bertha and Mr. Musliner and--and Rollo and even Annie Wennerberg? All this wrangling over your God and my God. God--drenched in Light. Or was God Light? Then why this groping in the dark? Julie, the waitress, had talked to her God along a string of beads. May Wallenstein went out on saint days to visit hers. Mrs. Wallenstein burned candles and kept her tongue free of the salt of swine in His name. One God and yet all struggling over Him. Tearing Him to pieces and setting up each his shred. Mrs. Wallenstein refuting May's Shred for her Shred. Julie's Shred to be whispered to along a string of beads. Your Shred. My Shred. Yet all torn off the divinely bleeding and omnipotent form of God--drenched in Light. To sit in that Light and soak it in through the pores--drowsily as the old woman talked--and talked on--through the spring-lit afternoons.

"A boy who was raised in such a home like his should go out of it to another religion! Not a Friday night in his life that he didn't see his papa and me light the candles for our Shabbas. I'm afraid to die. I'm afraid to die and leave him to face her God."

Silently then, Bertha would jounce the handle of the rolling chair.

"She's not right for him, Berthie. How I prayed with him that night he came home from the dance-hall where he met her, he should not go to such places--even before I knew where it would lead to. She ain't a helpful wife, Berthie--like I was to mine. I stinted. She spends. I mended and washed and ironed. She plays poker and eats all day, chocolates. My boy works on his feet fifteen hours and she spends it faster as he can earn it. He don't realize it yet--he's in love. It ain't nice to say it--but he's in love just with her body--no man can change his God for a woman's body--and have it last."

Talk--talk--talk--through the long sedative afternoons. Sometimes Bertha dozed a little, coming up to consciousness for snatches of it and then slipping off again, her head over toward one shoulder and her hand automatically at the little sedative jouncing motion.

"You should have seen, Berthie--such a little new suit as his papa bought him for _bar mitzvah_--to get _bar mitzvah_ by us is the holy time when boy becomes a little man in his religion. His papa--how every night after supper, in the back of the store so sometimes the customers had to wait, my husband heard that child his _bar mitzvah_ lesson. And for what? Such a blonde shixsa what don't do nothing except set him against his mother and his religion and throw out his money for him faster as he can make it. Thank God his papa didn't live to see it--maybe he blames me when we meet again--I couldn't help it, Julius--I tried--I prayed--I tried--I prayed--she got him with her white flesh, Julius--blonde flesh like he wasn't used to. When a woman gets hold of a boy that way--ours--not even his mother--or even his God, Julius--can hold him back--Julius--don't be mad--I couldn't hold--him--back--he's a good boy--but I couldn't hold him--back--"

And so on and on through the whimpering lips, until the copper band of light around the lake snapped out and with a great pulling and tugging and sometimes the help of a passerby, Bertha began to yank the wheel chair up the steps that were hewn out of natural rock.

***

Bertha's second summer there Wallenstein and his wife took a two weeks' holiday at a small lake resort upstate known as Becker's Point. May's second brother ran what they called "the pickle boat" around the lake in summer. A small provision tug which puffed about all day, dispensing from landing to landing, the tinned, the tabloid, and the compressed foods of the summer colony.

"You would rather have your vacation, Wally, by Fleishmans in the Catskills where you're used to it, but lots she cares where you get your vacation just so she gets hers. Her brother with his store on a boat! We're plain but substantial people. In our family we got our stores on streets like it is legitimate."

Wallenstein took his mother by the wrists and pressed his fingers into them until white areas sprang.

"For God's sake, mama, don't start anything with May now. I do want to go to Becker's Point. I need a rest. I'm nervous. Damnably nervous."

"I won't say anything, Wally, to her if I bust with it. I'm only saying it to you--I know how you like it at Fleishmans in the Catskills--"

"I'll send you there, ma--Bertha can take you--"

"Me? For myself, Wally, I'm satisfied to stay home and do a little saving. But that you should have to lay around such a _goy_ place!"

"Ma, if I hear that hateful word from you one more time! I'm worn out--I can't stand it--I'm nervous--you hear--"

"All right, Son. Don't holler. Maybe I won't be here so much longer you should holler at me like that--if only I wasn't afraid to die and meet papa--"

He dropped to one knee, kissing her hand.

"Mama, mama, don't torment me. I love her, mama, and I--sometimes--I--I'm afraid--I hate her! That's torment for you--torment of hell on earth. To love a woman at the same time that you hate her!"

***

So that summer for two weeks of an August that glared down upon the city until it was as bleached and polished as old bone, Bertha and Mrs. Wallenstein had the flat to themselves.

Hot, motionless days and nights that seemed to sit still and brood like pyramids! For the time, Bertha slept on a cot at the foot of the old woman's bed. She tossed a great deal and a little moan ran through her light snores, and sometimes she started up with short, sharp cries.

"Wally! Don't let her! Julius! It's _pesach_--Wally--don't eat that bread! Shiksa! A shiksa wife! No, no, papa--I tried--I begged. I prayed."

Often Bertha had to get up and turn on the light.

"You bane dreaming, Mrs. Wallenstein. See. It's Bertha. Here, let me fix your pillows--take a sip of water--so--there's nobody here but Bertha."

"I thought it was _pesach_, Bertha--when my people must eat only _matzoths_--the unleavened bread of God--and she wouldn't let me--Bertha."

"Shh-h-h, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"She stepped on them once," and up went the voice to the peak of hysteria that was so hard to quell. "_Matzoths_. God's bread. I can't ever forgive her that...."

And so on and so on and so on through the burning deserts of these motionless August nights and sometimes, of sheer exhaustion, Bertha slept. Vastly. With her cheek crumpled up against her arm, the sheets thrown back from her body, and the great ridge of her uncovered legs magnolia-white in the darkness.

One dawn a withered leaf fluttered down upon the heavy torpor of Bertha. It was Mrs. Wallenstein's hand, plucking at her from across the footboard of her bed.

"Berthie!"

"Oh--what--yes, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"Berthie, I been called home."

"Where?"

"I want to go, Berthie. It ain't long now before I won't be here no more and before I go--I want to go back down there. It won't be so hard I should have to face Julius if first I can only go home."

"Why, Mrs. Wallenstein, you bane home--here."

"Here is not home for me. Get me my foulard dress and my bonnet. Quick! I want we should start before the heat of the day."

"But your son will not like it."

A sudden slyness came curling out in the old woman's face.

"No, he don't like it if I go, Berthie. It ain't stylish that his old mother should remember old days, but Berthie, please, take me home. I want more as anything to go. Only down by Division Street, Berthie?"

"Mrs. Wallenstein--you can't walk--"

"Look, Berthie--when I got ambition, see how I can walk--see, Berthie--please--"

And sure enough, she began to limp about, outlandish in her nightdress, with the rack of her old body shaking through, but her face thrust out ahead of herself, like a lantern.

"Mrs. Wallenstein--your son--I promised to take good care--"

She was slyer and slyer, her eyebrows running up into little peaks and her cheek bones and chin jutting out into points.

"He don't got to know, Berthie. Take me home, Berthie, before I die. I'm going to die--soon. I hear it at nights underneath my sleep. And you know what it is, Berthie, to hear things--that way. Because always you too are listening to something. I heard it again last night--take me home, Berthie, so I can get strength back to meet papa---I want my old home where we lived twenty years and where my boy learned his _bar mitzvah_ lessons behind the counter--I want to go back--"

And Bertha washed the old face of its tear traces, brushed back the old hair into thin streaks that scarcely covered the scalp, and fastened around her the decent silk foulard dress.

The August day came out at them like a parched and coated tongue as they started for Division Street.

The wheels ran and banged, and a breeze that smelled of armpits and little babies, milk-soaked bibs and bedding that had been sweated into, blew through the street car. A breeze as curiously alive as breath.

It stood the little invisible nap of fine hairs on Bertha's forearm up on end in an electric little rash and it rushed against her ears, thick with words that could not form themselves out of the two dozen languages that the East Side exuded. A conglomerate breath, rich in nationalities and that would one day find voice. Bertha knew that rich kind of muteness. It beat up against her so.

At Canal Street it was as if the sidewalks ran shouting to meet them. It was hard to steady Mrs. Wallenstein against the dizzying swirl, because she was crying and through the dimness of tears wading her way eastward, her umbrella, which she carried as a steadying cane, waving out before her as if to clear the way of children and languid puffs of dirty newspaper and rinds and rinds of fruits.