Chapter IV: Part 4

"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.

"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.

But when he finally did turn his key in the lock, it was as if May, deeply simulating sleep, had been merely lying on the edge of it waiting, so quickly she pounced at him, the castle of her yellow puffs down over one ear and her right eye dragged upward from lying on it.

"May! My dear----"

"Yah, 'dear'--you'd better 'dear' me--leaving me shut up here day after day with a lunatic. Well, you don't need to go no further to hear her side of the story with her lies, lies, lies! You can hear it right here from me. Either that old woman gets out of this house--here--now--to-night--or I go! As God is my witness--I'm through!"

All the little wrinkles came running into his face like sand over paper and he tried to take her in his arms.

"Oh no, you don't! Not this time. A few smooth words can't make up for the all-day hell of living in this house. That old woman goes or I go! I couldn't stand another day of it. You've been a long time choosing, but you've got to chose now! I've tried. I've bit my tongue in two trying. But I'm done."

"Why, May," he said in the sedative tone that must have worn a little rut along his vocal cords from the repetition of it. "I know that Ma's not easy, and there's not a day that I don't think of my girl at home under conditions that aren't just right for her, but she's old, May, and she means well and--and good God, May, a man's mother is a man's mother, little eccentricities and all."

"No--no--we ain't going to argue any more, not while my dress buttons up the back with tiddlywinks. I've been over it all till I'm as crazy loony as she is. You got to decide. This time it's me or her. One of us gets out!"

His nose was like a blade, the nostrils sort of drawn in by the sharpness of his breath, and he stood under the hall light, growing paler and paler as the fatigue lines deepened.

"May! you've never been like this! Has anything unusual happened? My mother--how--where is she?"

"Oh no! Nothing unusual. Just the usual. That's the devil of it! Just the usual, but the camel's back broke to-day. There's no argument. There's just for you to decide which of us gets out." Her body was bent backward in a curve and her head dangling, as if it were a pale lantern weighing down the bamboo pole of her body.

He looked at her and at the shine of her flesh up at him through the lace of her bodice and the old familiar trembling seized him, but he dug with his nails into his palms and his words were all crowded behind his teeth.

"Well then by God--you go!"

It was as if he had stabbed her in the up-thrust of bosom she could always dazzle him with, because she threw out her arms and stood like a great open fan, with the finery of her sleeve drapes falling to the floor.

"Me!"

"You," he said, "yes--yes--you----"

"You don't mean that--Wally."

"I do," he said, still with the jam of words behind his teeth.

For the first time her body sort of unwound itself of its tight theatricalism and she looked at him with her mouth shaped to cry out, but it only quivered.

"If anybody goes out of this house, it's not going to be my mother. Get that! I may be low--but not that low. She stays here!"

"You heard what I got to say," she said.

"Yes, I heard," he said, and looked at her steadily and without the flicker of a muscle. "I heard."

There was a pause that was full of their breathing and then with a lightning gesture she darted out for his hand, but he was too quick for her.

"Wally!"

"No," he said, holding it behind him, "no, none of that."

She darted again and he looked at her coldly and smiled, holding himself on a little oblique that eluded her.

"That don't go this time, May. I'm at the end of my rope here. You have been called upon to make certain sacrifices. I know that. And I don't say they have always been easy ones. But that's part of this game of marriage. Learning to take the hurdles. You haven't taken yours. There's no argument here. Between two women, one of them young and able to take care of herself, and the other seventy years old and--my mother--well, if it's a case of one of them having to go, it's not going to be my mother! This is one of those deadlocks in marriage where there is no solution. A woman either gives in or she--don't. You don't!"

With his body thrust back from her, the words in her mouth were meal, and she knew it and suddenly, with a sinuosity that was rare with her, she had her arms about his knees and her cheek to him and her sobs coming, so that even through the fabric of suiting her warm breath reached him.

"Wally!"

He wrenched himself, but the vise of her arms was relentless, and so with his head held up and his body still tense he stood taut, feeling the tremor of her and finally the wet of her tears--warm--warm--against his knee.

"Get up," he said, with his head back and his body away from her.

"Wally--Wally--for God's sake don't--don't throw me off for her--Wally----."

"Off! Good God, what's a man to do--murder an old woman to get her out of the way of a young one--God--God--what mess have I let myself into! God--God--May--don't----."

"Wally"--her hands were up now against his waistcoat, so that the shape of them burned through, and his face, which he kept averted, was reddening, a slow red that ran down into his collar.

"You can't get me that--way--any--more----" he said, and caught her two hands by the wrists and flung her backward, but she was too quick for him again, and, as if from the momentum of the shove, she was back again, with her arms about his neck, and her lips which were shining with tears, straight and pat against his.

"No--No--May--none of that--no--I say--oh----"

Suddenly it was quiet, and when he lifted his head she was crouched in a cradle his arms made for her and the tears were running heavily down his cheeks.

"I'm tired," he said, crying frankly and daubing his eyes with the back of her hand, "--dog tired" and sank down on a chair in the hallway and she dragged up a stool, an outlandish one on the four curved horns of a bull, and her arms were about his knees again and her shining lips always close enough for him to feel the breath.

"You love me, Wally--I love you--what's the use--you can't give me up----"

He beat his knees.

"God. God. Was ever a man in my plight? I can't give you up. Well, where does that get me? I can't give her up, and the two of you together are making my home a hell. I'm cursed _with_ you and I'm cursed without you. God, God, was ever a man in such hell? I'll be the one to get out--by God--I'll end it--I'll be the one to get out----"

"Wally--Wally, that won't solve anything. That will bust it up for all three. I've got a way out for us. Wally, it's the old woman. I tell you she--she's got to go!"

"And, by God, I tell you, no! My mother doesn't pine out her days alone in a rooming house----"

"No--no, Wally, you don't understand. Why I--you think I'd let her pine out her days in a rooming house? The old woman's sick, Wally. Her mind's sick. The old woman needs a hospital--a fine sunny big hospital where they can take care of her----"

"My mother's not sick--she's--she's old--she's orthodox and she believes so strong it makes her eccentric--she's not sick---."

"She is, Wally. Any doctor would say so. You don't see her all day in the house like I do. You're making me live with a lunatic, Wally."

"You--take that back!"

"You don't know it. But I do. She sits all day talking to herself. I'm afraid of her. I wouldn't ask you to throw her out, Wally. I'm telling you she's got screws loose. She can get violent any time and then you will have trouble. There's institutions. Fine sunny clean ones. She ought to be committed. It's the only way, Wally---to save her--and to save us. You want us to go to hell over a--a loon? Lots of people go crazy on religion--the old woman, Wally--has screws loose--it's against the law not to give her medical treatment--there's plenty places, Wally--fine clean places where they don't even know they're in that kind of a place where she can live in peace and we can stay here in peace. Wally, are you going to throw me over for a poor old woman that's lost her mind? I tell you she's crazy, Wally. What'll you have out of it if I get out and leave you here with a loon? You got to support me. No man can get away without doing his duty to me. You got her and you got me any way you look at it. If one of us got to go, the poor crazy old lady ought to be the one. Get her in a--an--asy--a--hospital, Wally--and that'll leave us here--in our home--together. Wally--poor, tired Wally--home alone--here with his May."

His head fell down against the little cove of her shoulder and he could feel her warm kisses through his hair, and finally when he looked up with the stricken eyes of a St. Bernard dog, the tears ran down over his words.

"I can't give you up, May. My poor mother--she's sick--she needs the best of care--best--institution--she's sick--and she's got--to--go----"

***

Tears. Tears. The dining room looked crazy through the blur of them, and setting out the salt cellars and the vinegar cruet Bertha could scarcely find the table. It waved up at her, Tilted. Ran in little ripples that the tears made. Tears. Tears, The old woman----

She ran down the hall. It shot off in a little ell and on the slant of wall was the door. The door that was between the old woman and the knowing. The bitter knowing that must presently creep toward it and under it like a terrible tide. She crashed through the door and stood trembling in the center of the room.

The night light was burning and the old woman flew up in her vast walnut bed with a cry.

"Wally--who? Ach, Berthie, how you frightened me. I must have been dreaming. My Wally. My Julius--Berthie--it ain't nice you should rush in so on me. You've made me a pain--here. What is it, Berthie--nothing ain't wrong--Wally--home yet? Nothing ain't wrong?"

"Why--no--Mrs. Wallenstein--nothing--I yoost looked in a minute--maybe you want something?"

"No--I--Berthie--you shouldn't rush in so--a pain here--from the fright you gave me--such a pain--my heart--ach no--Berthie--I can't lay down--it's a knife in me--you frightened me so--my heart----"

Her face was so little, and back in the frill of her cap a pointed sort of receding look had set in, and she writhed up from the support of Bertha's arm, against the pain of lying back on the pillows.

"My drops--quick, Berthie--my drops. I--you shouldn't have frightened me--quick--my drops from the doctor."

There they stood, the little colorless phial of them on the table beside the bed. Five of them. Bertha knew how--drop-drop-drop-drop-drop--into a tumbler.

"Berthie--please----"

"No, Mrs. Wallenstein--no--yoost--lay still---- No, not any drops this time--sleep--sh-h-h--no drops--sleep."

"I--my drops--pain--I--I'm so tired, Berthie--hold me--you frightened me so--I was dreaming--my boy--she didn't get him--away from me--she tried, Berthie--I dreamed--but she didn't--he wouldn't--my boy--he stuck to his mama--she's old--she's in the way--but he stuck--why don't you give me my drops, Berthie? I--he stuck by his mama, Berthie----"

"Yes, Mrs. Wallenstein--he stuck----"

"I--I was never so tired--my drops--you should give me my drops--dark--Berthie--yes, Julius--tired--he stuck--my boy--to his mama--didn't he, Berthie?"

"Yes, Mrs. Wallenstein--yes----"

"--tired--my--drops. Wally--oh--God--ouch--oh--oh--ah----"

A sudden lurch forward in Bertha's arms, so that her torso rounded up and left an arch of space between it and the bed.

It was hard to unbend it, because the body had stiffened, and with her cheek to Mrs. Wallenstein's heart, Bertha pressed, pressed gently until the little attitude of convulsion had straightened. It was so quiet there with her cheek to Mrs. Wallenstein's dead heart.

***

A doctor folded the brittle hands. Little gulls skimming the old breast. The preliminaries of death were set in motion. A soul had been set free and mortals were solemn. Almost immediately the shades somehow were down and there was a new odor. The odor of death.

May had gone out like a flame. Her face seemed suddenly very small between the two enormous blobs of pearl earrings, and she had pinned up the flowing sleeves so that she had the plucked, necky look of a fine bird that had lost its feathers, revealing the long pores of dingy flesh.

"Poor Wally. Poor Wally."

He looked at her through tear-scalded eyes that did not see her at all.

"My mother--my poor little mother--gone without a word----"

"Lots of them go that way, Wally. My old woman died in her sleep----"