Part 8

"Ten years since I been home, Berthie. How I worked when I was a young woman down here to get ourselves out of it and now I got myself out of it how I eat my heart to be back in it. My boy was _bar mitzvah_ down here. My husband made us a living down here. My happiest days in my life I spent down here with my people. Hurry, Berthie. I want to get home. It's two blocks only now. I want you should see where my baby was born--"

Old Mrs. Wallenstein. Suddenly full of young little running steps--two long raspberry ovals of color out in her cheeks, the foulard dress ballooning as she hurried. Tears. Tears. Tears. Thick lenses of them.

***

The house in Division Street was as lean as a witch. Human bodies, lax, like pillows over sills, dangling and shouting from windows. That dingy and perpetual banner of poverty, the family wash line, kicking and writhing. There was a poultry store on the ground floor. Strong smells of chicken blood and hot fuzz, and on the high stoop, like a brooding conclave of the shawled women of the east, half a dozen old crones in white headkerchiefs and burning back deeply in them--deeply, burningly back, tired Old-Testament eyes.

Suddenly Mrs. Wallenstein's legs gave out under her. They would not climb that stoop. Twice, with Bertha's sturdy hand at her elbow, she raised her foot for the first step and twice her knees doubled under, until finally she crumpled up on the first step, leaning her face against the railing to cry.

"I can't go no further. I'm too happy. I'm home. This is my stoop. I don't know no more these faces, but this is my stoop."

And the snow of hot fuzz blew against her lips, and children, filthy with the fruit-rinds of the littered streets, gathered around, and the biblical old women with their peering faces and dead-leaf hands came down the steps, and Mrs. Wallenstein, laughing and crying, held out her arms to them and they drew back shyly.

Then came an avalanche of words. Words. A torrent of them that were new and alien to Bertha. Words that she had never heard before. Down off the chute of Mrs. Wallenstein's tongue they came, tumbling in Yiddish. Coals off a chute. Clatter. Clatter. And the circle of the old women closed in, and off ran the children, uninterested in just another conclave of the elders. And the sun grew hotter and higher and the din ground itself against the flesh like grime, and Bertha sat by waiting, while the whining voices of the old women, in a circle now on the lowermost step, wove on and on.

The heat was like a boil, gathering and throbbing into the head of high noon, and still the children shouted and the bodies that hung across window sills pointed and shrieked down to them. Pushcarts began to leak of their softening and rotting fruits; old men dozed into their beards; cats slept in the attitude of death, but with palpitating sides. A tailor sat on his ironing board reading the newspaper in which his half-eaten herring sandwich was wrapped, and played up and down on his small pocket piccolo, the thin grieving notes of the desert.

Oi--oi--the high quail voices of the old women--the dry old women past childbearing and with the dry eyes and the dry breasts and the dry tears.

Bertha began to walk. Banners waved. The banners of the flying gibbets of leggy underwear from high clothes lines. The jargon of Yiddish ran in a tide. More and more old women on hot high stoops. The life of the children close down to sidewalks with the rinds and the drip from the fruit carts.

Then suddenly Prince Street, little Italy, the women with the pot bellies of more and more child bearing, the men debonair with the blackness of hair and the whiteness of teeth. Curving scimitar of Chinese Pell Street, the shape of a mandarin's little-finger nail; skins the color of apricots. Much further down ran Front Street with its flotsam from the sea and still further down, West Street of the water pipe and fez. Hot, disturbed breaths of alien climes, not soluble one in another, but all soluble in the new world. And out of the new world was one day to come the rich composite expression that struggled so for articulation.

The words of the jeweled sands.

***

The day was on the down side. Through the heat dance all the lean houses seemed to have wavy walls, and it was not easy to manipulate Mrs. Wallenstein back again to the street car. They had to let two of them pass because again the old woman could not quite bring her foot to raise for the step, but finally she made the hoist and plumped down inside with a burst of perspiration.

Except for the sighs which blew and blew off the twisted old crags of lips, she seemed to doze, with her fist plunged deep into Bertha's palm and throbbing there.

"You seen, Berthie--my people--those are my people--and his--our people. Berthie--who are your people?"

"My people?" She looked at her softly, the wide lips falling apart to smile. "My people? Why those are my people," she said, her eyes very blue and her lips fumbling to say more. "Those are my people. Out there. All. Everywhere."

***

It was the last time the old woman ever left the house. August roared on and Wallenstein and his wife returned. Bertha moved her cot back into the breathless room that opened off the kitchen, and the old woman resumed her long, motionless watches in the shadowy arch between the folding doors. Sitting there during the long merriments of the poker game, her dry eyes forever focused upon her son, they could seem to smear into a single tearless and reproachful orb in the center of her forehead.

"Gives me the jimjams--her sitting back there--" was another frequent _sotto voce_ of May, her white flesh writhing up and down under the large pearls and transparent chiffons she was fond of wearing.

"Mama dear, don't you think you had better let Bertha take you to bed--we're going to play a round of rudles yet and you must be tired."

"I'm all right, son."

Once a guest, a Mr. McGuire, who was a frequent visitor, swung around in his chair to her.

"Come on, Grandma, have one of these kosher ham sandwiches. They're kosher, ain't they, Wally--."

Oh. Oh. Oh. The poor dried prunes of eyes in Mrs. Wallenstein's head. They seemed to have died there.

***

One January noon when there were pork chops snapping on the stove for lunch, Mrs. Wallenstein was suddenly missing from her rocking chair beside the window in her room. She left there less and less now, and never without the hoist of Bertha's arm.

"Mrs. Wallenstein--the old woman--she's not in her room. I can't find her."

May was drying her hair in a great fan that spread in a patch of cold sunlight on the window sill.

"She's not far. No such luck."

Sure enough, Bertha finally discovered her shivering and crying on the fire escape, where she had climbed with an agility that frenzy alone could have given her.

"Mrs. Wallenstein, you must come in from the cold."

"Let her stay out there, Bertha. She'll soon get enough of it, if she sees she can't spite me by one of her loony fits."

"Quick--come in right away. That is not nice to sit in the cold."

"I can't stand it. She should cut out my heart to get rid of me, but I can't stand it I should have to spend my days in such a household where my son's home is made every minute an insult to his religion. It's like my own heart was frying with them pork chops. Thank God his papa didn't live to see it."

Bertha coaxed her in, dragging her a chair for the step from sill to floor, and full of little urgings.

"There. Now. So."

"It would be better, Berthie, if I die to-morrow. Then I don't stand any more in my son's way or in my daughter-in-law's."

"No, no, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"It's not good, Berthie, a woman should got to stand between such a good son's happiness with his wife like I do. Only, Berthie, she ain't his happiness--he don't know it--but I do. A man who has to pay with his God for his love don't find no happiness. My poor son--he don't know which he should be first. My son or her husband. I'm in the way, Berthie. Nobody knows it better as I do. Berthie ... never leave me, Berthie...."

She needed Bertha so. Even the absurd fashion in which she pronounced her name was like a cry in the dark. A little winged sob that could beat its way and nest in Bertha's heart and hurt there. Sometimes at night, long after the lights were out, the cry would come through to her, and down she would tiptoe and curl up at the foot of the old woman's bed, ponderous as a mastiff.

Wallenstein was grateful. He had her come down to his shoe store on Thirty-fourth Street to be fitted for two fine strong pairs of bluchers, and as she went out with the package under her arm, he said:

"Never leave my mother, Bertha, and you won't regret it. She's a little peculiar in her ways and her ways aren't my wife's ways--but a better woman doesn't breathe--never leave her, Bertha."

"Yah--sure--never--"

Poor Wally. It was as if a wire cage had curved itself somehow about him, with the egress woven cunningly into the mesh. He was in and the two women with him, making a prison of what, with either of them alone, might have been a nest.

Bertha felt, dumbly, fiercely, the relentless pattern of that mesh, the angry tortured eyes of the three of them looking out. She wanted to reach and to fold them all to her understanding. Even May.

Constantly, as that winter dragged through, there were half moons in May's hand where the finger nails bit in.

"She-devil" was an expletive which smoked constantly on her lips. She said it with her pinkly pointed finger nails cutting up into her palms and her toes piling and her teeth grating. "She devil."

One day she ran from the luncheon table into the clothes closet in her bedroom. It was horrible. Because she bit at the empty sleeves of gowns hanging there, tore fabrics, jerked hangers from their hooks, trampled on Wally's dressing gown, kicked until she bruised her shoes and toes against the wall, and finally half collapsed in a hurricane of the garments she had pulled down about herself. "She devil. Old Hag. Matzoth face. Can't stand it. Sheenies. Both. Stingy-gut. She-devil."

It happened trivially. Something like this. About noon a fog had descended over the city. One of those gray smothers that roll in off the sea. There was something extremely cozy about the indoors on a day like this. Bertha prepared tea and fluffed up an egg omelette with a fusty sense of that warm indoor coziness.

May had been stacking chips for a poker party that night. She was playing practically every afternoon now, losing large sums which were the subject of heated controversy with Wally, and five evenings out of the week there were games at the house, too.

This day she wore a pink flannel wrapper and her hair was in curl rags that rose off her temples like a shriek. She had a headache, too.

"Got it too good," was the old woman's under-her-breath diagnosis of the almost daily ritual of cold compress or headache powder.

"Yeh--swell chance for any one to have it good with a tightwad like you in the house." Also _sotto voce_.

Oftentimes Bertha, hearing, would sicken with a sense of futility that made almost the lifting of a pan from the stove too nerve hurting to be endured.

Lunch was a meal to dread with the two women alone, and without the intermediary influence of Wallenstein.

When May in the pink flannel wrapper entered the fog-swimming dining room, she switched on the lights, seven high-power ones in the colored glass dome over the table.

"Give me a tablet in a glass of water first, Bertha. My head's splitting."

Then old Mrs. Wallenstein came in, stiffly in her black percale house dress shotted with white four-leaf clovers, and carrying a bowl of thick black lentil soup which she had warmed from a specially prepared crock of it which she kept on the window sill.

"Say, May, since when has Wally got a stand-in with the electric light company? If I can find my mouth in the middle of the day, you should find yours with your younger eyes."

With a good humor which she valiantly tried to simulate for the trial of these noonday meals together, the old woman clicked out the lights again, just as May gulped down the headache tablet. The almost reflex action of a woman who for a period of thirty thrifty years had run her own home; and with that same reflex of a woman bound in turn to run hers, May, the fuzz of fog in a whirlpool of anger about her, sprang to the wall, clicking the lights back again.

"You dare," she cried with her lips lifting back drily off her teeth, "you dare to dictate to me when I can have light in my own house and when I can't!"

The old woman had a way of appearing to shrivel and to yellow under the lash of her daughter-in-law's tongue. She seemed to recede to a point.

"Is that the way, May, a daughter-in-law should talk to her husband's mother, nearly three times her age, and who didn't mean nothing but a little economy?"

"Economy my hind-foot! I'd like to see you or anybody like you tell me when I can have the electric light on in my house and when I can't. Not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks."

"Maybe, May, if you didn't know everything for yourself so well and would let an old woman three times your age help----"

"Not you. You can't tell me nothing I don't know already."

"I can tell you that a good dutiful wife don't squander her husband's money away on gambling debts and matinees--"

"You keep your gab out of my affairs. You've done enough damage in this house as it is. My husband is my business."

"Your husband is my son!"

"More's the pity."

The shuddering, sucky, ligament-twisting cry of the mothers of sons bearing them. That was the kind of moaning noise Mrs. Wallenstein made as she went down into a little huddle on a dining-room chair.

"Mrs. Wallenstein!"

"Let 'er alone, Bertha. I'm used to those bluffs. I've seen her topple over into those fake faints for years now. Temper, that's all. She's tough as tripe."

"Oh God, why don't I die."

"Mrs. Wally--she bane old----"

"Let her alone, Bertha, I said. Hands off. That's the trouble now. Her out there in the kitchen with you all day crying for sympathy. It's a good thing you're built like a rock-of-ages, with her on your neck all day or she'd have driven you away long ago, the way she did every other servant we ever had. I'm sick of it, I am. Wally's got to decide between her and me and pretty damn quick, too. I wish to God I could go off somewhere and live in one room and never have to clap eyes on the whole shebang again. He'll have to settle good and heavy on me too--mind you that. _Matzoth house_, that's what I call this. Well, thank God, I wasn't raised no matzoth eater."

"Belittle me. Belittle even my boy ... the finest son a mother ever could be proud of--but don't make little my religion--don't make little my God because he is not your God."

"God! Who said anything about your God. Matzoth is what I said, and I say it again. _Matzoth house_. Two stoves. Two sets of dishes. Matzoth crumbs all over the house so I have to be ashamed to have company at my own table for matzoth. Matzoth. He likes 'em too--dips 'em in coffee. Once a matzoth dunker always a matzoth dunker. Can't change a leopard's spots. Matzoth is what I said. You hear! _Matzoth house!_"

"Julius, my husband! Wally, my son! I can't keep it shut up in me no more. I can't live here no more. To have to see, with every hour I live, everything what is sacred to me and to mine, made little. Papa, where are you up there--let me come to you. I'm alone--down here, and I'm afraid to leave Wally--alone--with no God--help me, Julius--help----"

May swung heavily into her chair.

"Well," she said, flopping the omelette which was cold by now to her plate and jabbing into it with her fork, "here is where I am let in for another pleasant lunch hour. It's a wonder I don't croak of _kosher_ indigestion."

"I can't hear that word no more so abused! It's like salt in a sore. Oh--oh--oh--if not for my son, I would right away pack my things--why did he pull me up away from my people down there--these ways ain't my ways--those are my people--he should let me go back."

"Well, no insin-uations, but you can take it from me if he didn't always have you nagging him over to your ways, I could make him a darn sight happier than he's ever been in his life before. He'd be a live one, that son of yours--if he dared."

"That just goes to show! A woman with her thoughts on her home and her husband's interests and--and children--don't got time for such shennanigan talk like her husband should be a--a live one."

"You're going to ram that children talk down my throat once too often. I'll have children when I get good and ready to have children and not before."

"A woman shouldn't put her time for it, before God's time for it."

"If--if you weren't his mother and--old--I'd drive you out of the house for less than that."

"Why don't you? It would make it easier than I should walk out from my son's house on my own----"

"Well then--I do! You can't stay here day after day to devil the life and soul out of me. I won't stand it. I--now--you--go--!"

"God, papa--God--Wally--no--no--it ain't possible I should live to see it--out from my own son's home----"

"Yes--yes--out of your own son's home--driven out by the devil in you--yes--yes----"

"Oh, Mrs. Wally--she bane old--oh--oh--oh, Mrs. Wally----"

"And you! Square Head, you! Lummox! There's something about you gives me the jimjams. For all I know you're one of those still ones that run deep. How do I know you're not taking sides with the old woman and running to my husband with lies! Go--the two of you--the quicker the better--go--go--go--"

It was then, because the words in her throat were a mere strangle and her hands were curved and spread out like claws, that May ran screaming to the clothes-closet, dragging down the garments in their avalanche of fury down about her and gasping, choking, spluttering:

"She devil! Matzoth God! She devil!"

***

Toward dusk Bertha began to try to feed the old woman soup out of a spoon that clicked against the square, porcelain teeth that were twenty years too young for the gums.

"Can't swallow. Leave me alone, Berthie. I'm an old woman put out from my own son's house. Where shall I go, Berthie? No. No. I won't go. Nobody can drive me out from my son who needs me and who has lost his God."

Forcing the spoon against the glassy teeth a sense of the race indomitability of this old woman smote Bertha. Exactly as she had recognized the Polish national anthem with her heart, so Bertha knew this. There was no suppressing the mother of Wallenstein. Oppress her, yes, but the light of the children of Israel was like a camp fire in her eyes and would not be ground out.

It was bitter to stay, and the lips of the mother of Wallenstein were twisted with that bitterness.

"The reason, Berthie, why nothing is so wonderful in a woman's life as to have children, is because even to suffer for them--to suffer for them is a blessing."

"To suffer--for--them----"

"But I don't wish it to no woman she should have such a knife in her heart like mine. Death is not the only way to lose a child. You should thank God, Berthie, you don't know what it is to give up a son of your own heart's blood----"

"Not know what it is----"

The brook of the frozen tears, she could feel them thawing and rushing up against her throat. Bertha who so seldom cried. She tried to hold them back, tensing her tonsils into a dam against them.

"Take the soup away--Berthie--I can't take it--you're spilling it on the sheet----"

How they pained, the pressing gorging tears. She was blind with them, and when she swallowed them down with her great strength, they ran back upon themselves and filled her with hurting torrents.

"Don't cry, Mrs. Wallenstein," she said finally, the words coming out evenly over her own inner hemorrhage of tears.

"Two babies I lost to death, Berthie--but not even such suffering was so bad as to lose a child to life."

"To--_give_--a--child--to--life, Mrs. Wallenstein."

"Hold me, Berthie, close--and say that over to me--over and over again--to _give_--and not to lose--him----."

"To--give--a--child--to--life. To--give--a--child--to--life. To--give----."

The old woman slept and finally there was dinner to be prepared and it was Bertha's day for scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees.

It was good, the great harsh drags across the splintery boards, pools of soapy water smearing before the brush, her shoulders sweating. Good, good, to sprawl for that reach under the sink, with her great legs thrown out like those of a swimming frog's, and her heart through the soft pad of breasts, beating down close where the tremors were. The little vibratory tremors....

Great soapy circles. Pain that had dimension--pain the shape of her arm sockets. Singing knees and the pleasant relief of lifting one from the floor so that the sensation died down like suds.

Zeouw! Zeouw! This way and that, the water running a little after the brush, and the smell that was almost a green one, coming up between the boards. Water under her brush. She ground it in and in and in, back into the soil from whence at some time or another it had come and from whence it would come again.

At seven Wallenstein would come. There was dinner to be prepared. A round of roast the shape of a cord of kindling wood. Gristle ran through it. She cut it out as if it had been a nerve. A nasty hurting thing. It was good to be able to slither it out and throw it away in the tin pail under the sink.

Onions to peel. Tears. Light tears that seemed to leap from the outside and lay against the eyes. Not the inner pushing ones that tore the throat in their frenzy to get past. The smart ran up to her nostrils. Good. Good. She could rub her nose, thick, white and squatting and lawk, the smart was gone. Easy pain. The pull of her arm sockets. Easy pain. But to be able to tear open her throat--somehow--and get in at the torment there--the buried secret torments that had not dimension....

Wallenstein would be home any minute now. Bertha had a sly little procedure before dinner. It was to draw together two of the most comfortable chairs in the living room, chummily, as if two women had been sewing and gossiping there during the long quiet of an afternoon. And Wallenstein liked the little first-hand attentions that May, in prime mood, would give him. His slippers with the toes out, standing waiting. A glass of orange juice on the table beside their bed.

The look of strain and of drain would run out of his face when he walked in on evidences of what might indicate that a day of rare tranquillity had rolled over the household. He was quick at these perceptions. An overturned hassock might mean that May's toe had been stubbed in rage, or the sweetish thickness of an incense stick, burning up into garlic fumes, warn of conflict before he had even fitted his key into the lock.

Bertha was particularly careful about the two chairs. She dragged them together and they squealed on their casters. They met his eye directly he entered. May was stretched asleep on the sitting room couch, her cheeks still wet and her lips, always with the sensuous look of just having been kissed very hard, slightly, rather appealingly, apart. One of her hands trailed to the floor and there was a pale scatter of freckles on her arm, great isolated ones, so large and far apart that Wallenstein could run his lips up it as if it were a flute, kissing them one by one.