A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




"You should know how sick such talk makes me!"

"I haven't got hard feelings, Sammy, because Clara don't like it here."

"She does."

"For why should an up-to-date American girl like Clara like such an
old-fashioned place as I keep? Nowadays, girls got different ideas. They
don't think nothing of seventy-five-dollar suits and twelve-dollar
shoes. I can't help it that it goes against my grain no matter how fine
a money-maker a girl is. In the old country my sister Carrie and me
never even had shoes on our feet until we were twelve, much less--"

"But, ma--"

"Oh, I don't blame her, Sam. I don't blame her that she don't like it
the way I dish up everything on the table so we can serve ourselves. She
likes it passed the way they did that night at Mrs. Goldfinger's new
daughter-in-law's, where everything is carried from one to the next one,
and you got to help yourself quick over your shoulders."

"Clara's like me, ma; she wants you to keep a servant to do the waiting
on you."

"It ain't in me, Sam, to be bossed to by a servant, just like I can't
take down off the walls pictures of your papa _selig_ and your grandma,
because it ain't stylish they should be there. It's a feeling in me for
my own flesh and blood that nothing can change."

"Clara don't want you to change that, ma."

"She's a fine, up-to-date girl, Sam. A girl that can work herself up to
head floor-lady in wholesale ribbons and forty dollars a week has got in
her the kind of smartness my boy should have in his wife. I'm an old
woman standing in the way of my boy. If I wasn't, I could go out to
Marietta, Ohio, by Ruby, and I wouldn't keep having inside of me such
terrible fears for my boy and--and how things are now on the other side
and--and--"

"Now, now, ma; no April showers!"

"An old woman that can't even be happy with a good daughter like Ruby,
but hangs always on her son like a stone around his neck!"

"You mean like a diamond."

"A stone, holding him down."

"Ma!" Mr. Lipkind pushed back, napkin awry at his throat and his eyes
snapping points of light. "Now if you want to spoil my breakfast, just
say so and I--I'll quit. Why should you be living with Ruby out in
Marietta if you're happier here with me where you belong? If you knew
how sore these here fits of yours make me, you'd cut them out--that's
what you would. I'm not going over to Clara's at all now for supper, if
that's how you feel about it."

Mrs. Lipkind rose then, crossed, leaning over the back of his chair and
inclosing his face in the quivering hold of her two hands. "Sammy,
Sammy, I didn't mean it! I know I ain't in your way. How can I be when
there ain't a day passes I don't invite you to get married and come here
to live and fix the flat any way what Clara wants or even move down-town
in a finer one where she likes it? I know I ain't in your way, son. I
take it back."

"Well, that's more like it."

"You mustn't be mad at mamma when she gets old-fashioned ideas in her
head."

He stroked her hand at his cheek, pressing it closer.

"Sit down and finish your breakfast, little sweetheart mamma."

"Is it all right now, Sammy?"

"Of course it is!" he said, his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

"Promise mamma you'll go over by Clara's to-night."

"But--"

"Promise me, Sammy; I can't stand it if you don't."

"Alright, I'll go, ma."

The Declaration of Economic Independence is not always a subtle one.
There was that about Clara Bloom, even to the rather Hellenic swing of
her very tailor-made back and the firm, neat clack of her not too high
heels, which proclaimed that a new century had filed her fetter-free
from the nine-teen-centuries-long chain of women whose pin-money had too
often been blood-money or the filched shekels from trousers pocket or
what in the toga corresponded thereto.

And yet, when Miss Bloom smiled, which upon occasion she did
spontaneously enough to show a gold molar, there were not only Hypatia
and Portia in the straight line of her lips, but lurked in the little
tip-tilt at the corners a quirk from Psyche, who loved and was so loved,
and in the dimple in her chin a manhole, as it were, for Mr.
Samuel Lipkind.

At six o'clock, where the wintry workaday flows into dusk and Fifth
Avenue flows across Broadway, they met, these two, finding each other
out in the gaseous shelter of a Subway kiosk. She from the tall, thin,
skylightless skyscraper dedicated to the wholesale supply of woman's
insatiable demand for the ribbon gewgaw; he from a plate-glass shop with
his name inscribed across its front and more humbly given over to the
more satiable demand of the male for the two-dollar hat. There was a
gold-and-black sign which ran across the not inconsiderable width of
Mr. Lipkind's store-front and which invariably captioned his four inches
of Sunday-news-paper advertisement:

SAMMY LIPKIND WANTS YOUR HEAD

As near as it is possible for the eye to simulate the heart, there was
exactly that sentiment in his glance now as he found out Miss Bloom, she
in a purple-felt hat and the black scallops of escaping hair, blacker
because the red was out in her cheeks.

He broke into the kind of smile that lifted his every feature,
screw-lines at his eyes coming out, head bared, and his greeting
beginning to come even before she was within hearing distance of it.

There was in Mr. Lipkind precious little of Lothario, Launcelot,
Galahad, or any of that blankety-blank-verse coterie. There remains yet
unsung the lay of the five-foot-five, slightly bald, and ever so
slightly rotund lover. Falstaff and Romeo are the extremes of what Mr.
Lipkind was the not unhappy medium. Offhand in public places, men would
swap crop conditions and city politics with him. Twice, tired mothers in
railway stations had volunteered him their babies to dandle. Young
women, however, were not all impervious to him, and uncrossed their feet
and became consciously unconscious of him across street-car aisles. In
his very Two Dollar Hat Store, Sara Minniesinger, hooked of profile, but
who had impeccably kept his debits and credits for twelve years back
under the stock-balcony and a green eye-shade, was wont to cry of
evenings over and for him into her dingy pillow. He was so unconscious
of this that, on the twelfth anniversary of her incarceration beneath
the stock-balcony, he commissioned his mother to shop her a crown of
thorns in the form of a gold-handled umbrella with a bachelor-girl
flash-light attachment.

There are men like that, to whom life is not only a theosophy of one
God, but of one women who is sufficient thereof. When Samuel Lipkind
greeted Clara Bloom there was just that in his ardently
appraising glance.

"Didn't mean to keep you waiting, Clara--a last-minute customer. _You_
know."

"I've been counting red heads and wishing the Subway was pulled by white
horses."

"Say, Clara, but you look a picture! Believe me, Bettina, that is some
lid!"

Miss Bloom tucked up a rear strand of curl, turning her head to extreme
profile for his more complete approval.

"Is it an elegant trifle, Sam? I ask you is it an elegant trifle?"

"Clara, it's--immense! The best yet! What did it set you back?"

"Don't ask me! I'm afraid just saying it would give your mother
heart-failure by mental telepathy."

He linked her arm. "Whatever you paid, it's worth the money. It sets you
off like a gipsy queen."

"None of that, Sam! Mush is fattening."

"Mush nothing! It's the truth."

"Hurry. Schulem's got a new rule--no reserving the guest-table."

They let themselves be swept into the great surge of the underground
river with all of the rather thick-skinned unsensitiveness to
shoulder-to-shoulder contact which the Subway engenders. Swaying from
straps in a locked train, which tore like a shriek through a tube whose
sides sweated dampness, they talked in voices trained to compete
with the roar.

"What's the idea, Clara? When you telephoned yesterday I was afraid
maybe it was--Eddie Leonard cutting in on my night again."

"Eddie nothing. Is it a law, Sam, that I have to eat off your mother
every Wednesday night of my life?"

"No--only--you know how it is when you get used to things one way."

"I told you I had something to talk over, didn't I?"

They were rounding a curve now, so that they swayed face to face, nose
to nose.

A few crinkles, frequent with him of late, came out in rays from his
eyes.

"Is it anything you--you couldn't say in front of ma?"

"Yes."

He inserted two fingers into his collar, rearing back his head.

"Anything wrong, Clara?"

"You mean is anything right."

They rode in silence after that, both of them reading in three colors
the border effulgencies of frenzied advertising.

But when they emerged to a quieter up-town night that was already
pointed with a first star, he took her arm as they turned off into a
side-street that was architecturally a barracks to the eye, brownstone
front after brownstone front after brownstone front. Block after block
of New York's side-streets are sunk thus in brown study.

"You mustn't be so ready to be put out over every little thing I say,
Clara. Is it anything wrong to want you up at the house just as often as
we can get you?"

"No, Sam; it ain't that."

"Well then, what is it?"

"Oh, what's the use beginning all that again? I want to begin to-night
where we usually leave off."

"Is it--is it something we've talked about before, Clara?"

"Yes--and no. We've talked so much and so long without ever getting
anywheres--what's the difference whether we've ever talked it before
or not?"

"You just wait, Clara; everything is going to come out fine for us."

Her upper lip lifted slightly. "Yes," she said; "I've heard that
before."

"We're going to be mighty happy some day, just the same, and don't you
let yourself forget it. We've got good times ahead."

"Oh dear!" she sighed out.

"What?"

"Nothing."

He patted her arm. "You'll never know, Clara, the torture it's been for
me even your going out those few times with Eddie Leonard has put me
through. You're mine, Clara; a hundred Eddies couldn't change that."

"Who said anybody wanted to change it?"

He patted her arm again very closely. "You're a wonderful girl, Clara."

They turned up the stoop of Mrs. Schulem's boarding-house, strictly
first-class. How they flourish in the city, these institutions of the
Not Yet, the Never Was, the Never Will Be, and the Has Been! They are
the half-way houses going up and the mausoleums coming down life's
incline, and he who lingers is lost to the drab destiny of this or that
third-floor-back hearthstone, hot and cold running water, all the
comforts of home. That is why, even as she moved up from the rooming to
the boarding-house and down from the third-floor back to the
second-story front, there was always under Clara Bloom's single bed the
steamer-trunk scarcely unpacked, and in her heart the fear that, after
all, this might not be transiency, but home. That is why, too, she paid
her board by the week and used printed visiting-cards.

And yet, if there exists such a paradox as an aristocracy among
boarding-houses, Mrs. Schulem's was of it. None of the boiled odors lay
on her hallways, which were not papered, but a cream-colored fresco of
better days. There was only one pair of bisques, no folding-bed, and but
the slightest touch of dried grasses in her unpartitioned front parlor.
The slavey who opened the door was black-faced, white-coated, and his
bedraggled skirts were trousers with a line of braid up each seam. Two
more of him were also genii of the basement dining-hall, two low rooms
made into one and entirely bisected by a long-stemmed T of dining-table,
and between the lace-curtained windows a small table for two, with
fairly snowy napkins flowering out of its water-tumblers, and in its
center a small island of pressed-glass vinegar-cruet, bottle of darkly
portentous condiment, glass of sugar, and another of teaspoons.

It was here that Miss Bloom and Mr. Lipkind finally settled themselves,
snugly and sufficiently removed from the T-shaped battalion of eyes and
ears to insure some privacy.

"Well," said Mr. Lipkind, unflowering his napkin, spreading it across
his knees, and exhaling, "this is fine!"

There was an aura of authoritativeness seemed to settle over Miss Bloom.

This to one of the black-faced genii: "Take care of us right to-night,
Johnson, and I'll fix it up with you. See if you can't manage it in the
kitchen to bring us a double portion of those banana fritters I see
they're eating at the big table. Say they're for Miss Bloom. I'll fix it
up with you."

"Now, Clara, don't you go bothering with extras for me. This is
certainly fine. Sorry you never asked me before."

"You know why I never asked you before."

"Why, you never saw the like how pleased ma was. She was the first one
to fall in with the idea of my coming to-night."

She dipped into a shallow plate of amber soup. "I know," she said, "all
about that."

"Ma's a good sport about being left at home alone."

"How do you know? You never tried it until to-night. I'll bet it's the
first time since that night you first met me, five years ago, at Jerome
Fertig's, and it wouldn't have been then if she hadn't had the neuralgia
and it was your own clerk's wedding."

He laid down his spoon, settling back a bit from the table, pulling the
napkin across his knees out into a string.

"I thought we'd gone all over that, Clara."

"Yes; but where did it get us? That's why we're here to-night, Sam--to
get somewheres."

He crumbed his bread. "What do you mean, Clara?"

She forced his slow gaze to hers calmly, her hands outstretched on the
table between them. "I've made up my mind, Sam. Things can't go on this
way no longer between us."

"Just what do you mean by that?"

"I mean that we've either got to act or quit."

He was rolling the bread pills again, a flush rising. "You know where I
stand, Clara, on things between us."

"Yes, Sam, and now you know where I stand." The din of the dining-room
surged over the pause between them. Still in the purple hat, and her
wrap thrown back over her chair, she held that pause coolly, level of
eye. "I'm thirty-one now, Sam, three weeks and two days older than you.
I don't see the rest of my days with the Arnstein Ribbon Company. I'm
not getting any younger. Five years is a long time out of a girl's life.
Five of the best ones, too. She likes to begin to see her future when
she reaches my age. A future with a good providing man. You and me are
just where we started five years ago."

"I know, Clara, and I'd give my right hand to change things."

"If I'd been able to save a cent, it might be different. But I
haven't--I'm that way. I make big and spend big. But you can't blame a
girl for wanting to see her future. That's me, and I'm not ashamed
to say it."

"If only, Clara, I could get you to see things my way. If you'd be
willing to try it with ma. Why, with a little diplomacy from you, ma'd
move heaven and earth to please you."

"There's no use beginning that, Sam; it's a waste of time. Why--why,
just the difference in the way me and--and your mother feel on money
matters is enough. There's no use to argue that with me; it's a waste
of time."

He lifted and let droop his shoulders with something of helplessness in
the gesture. "What's the use, then? I'm sure I don't know what more to
say to you, Clara. Oh, don't think my mother don't realize how things
are between us--it's all I can do to keep denying and denying."

"Well, you can't say she knows from my telling."

"No; but there's not a day she don't say to me, particularly these last
few times since you been breaking your dates with us pretty
regular--I--well she sees how it worries me, and there's not a day she
don't say to me, 'Sammy,' she said to me, only this morning, 'if I
thought I was keeping you and Clara apart--'"

"A blind man could see it."

"There's not a day passes over her head she don't offer to go to live
with my sister in Ohio, when I know just how that one month of visiting
her that time nearly killed her."

"Funny visiting an own daughter could nearly kill anybody."

"It's my brother-in-law, Clara. My mother couldn't no more live with
Isadore Katz than she could fly. He's a fine fellow and all that, but
she's not used to a man in the house that potters around the kitchen and
the children's food and things like Isadore loves to. She's used to her
own little home and her own little way."

"Exactly."

"If I want to kill my mother, Clara, all I got to do is put her away
from me in her old age. Even my sister knows it. 'Sammy,' she wrote to
me that time after ma's visit out there, 'I love our mother like you do,
but I got a nervous husband who likes his own ways about the
housekeeping and the children and the cooking, and nobody knows better
than me that the place for ma to be happy is with you in her own home
and her own ways of doing.'"

"I call that a nerve for a sister to let herself out like that."

"It's not nerve, Clara; it's the truth. Ruby's a good girl in her way."

"What about you--ain't your life to be thought of? Ain't it enough she
was married off with enough money for her husband to buy a half-interest
in a ladies' ready-to-wear store out there?"

"Why, if I was to bring my little wife to that flat of ours, Clara, or
any other kind further down-town that she'd want to pick out for
herself, I think my mother would just walk on her hands and knees to
make things pleasant for her. Maybe you don't know it, but on your
Wednesday nights up at the house, she is up at five o'clock in the
morning fixing around and cooking the things she thinks you'll like."

"I'm not saying a word against your mother, Sam. I think she's a grand
woman, and I admire a fellow that's good to his mother. I always say,
'Give me a fellow every time that is good to his mother and that fellow
will be good to his wife.'"

"I'm not pretending to say ma mayn't be a little peculiar in her ways,
but you never saw an old person that wasn't, did you? Neither am I
saying it's exactly any girl's idea to start out married life with a
third person in--"

"I've always swore to myself, Sam, and I'm not ashamed to admit it, that
if I can't marry to improve myself, I'm going to stay single till I can.
I'm not a six-dollar-a-week stenog that has to marry for enough to eat.
I can afford to buy a seventy-five dollar suit every winter of my life
and twelve-dollar shoes every time I need them. The hat on my head cost
me eighteen-fifty wholesale, without having to be beholding to
nobody, and--"

"Ma don't mean those things, Clara. It's just when she hears the price
girls pay for things nowadays she can't help being surprised the way
things have changed."

"I'm not a small potato, Sam. I never could live like a small potato."

"Why, you know there's nothing I like better than to see you dressed in
the best that money can buy. You heard what I said about that hat just
now, didn't you? Whatever it cost, it's worth it. I can afford to dress
my little wife in the best that comes. There's nothing too good
for her."

"Yes; but--"

"All ma needs, Clara, is a little humoring. She's had to stint so all
her life, it's a little hard to get her used to a little prosperity.
Take me. Why, if I bring her home a little shawl or a pockabook that
cost, say, ten dollars, you think I tell her? No. I say, 'Here's a
bargain I picked up for three ninety-eight,' and right away she's happy
with something reduced."

"Your mother and me, Sam, and, mind you, I'm not saying she isn't a
grand old lady, wasn't no more made to live together than we was made to
fly. I couldn't no more live her way than she could live mine. I've got
a practical head on my shoulders--I don't deny it--and I want to improve
ourselves in this world when we marry, and have an up-to-date home like
every young couple that starts out nowadays."

"Sure, we--"

"That flat of yours up there or any other one under the conditions would
be run like the ark. I'm an up-to-date girl, I am. There's not a girl
living would be willing to marry a well-off fellow like you and go huck
herself in a place she couldn't even have the running of herself or have
her own say-so about the purse-strings. It may sound unbecoming, but
when I marry I'm going to better myself, I am."

"I--why--"

"If she can't even stand for her own son-in-law walking into his own
kitchen in his own house--Oh, you don't find me starting my married
life that way at this late date. I haven't held off five years
for that."

Mr. Lipkind pushed back his but slightly tasted food, lines of strain
and a certain whiteness out in his face. "It--it just seems awful,
Clara, this going around in a circle and not getting anywheres."

"I'm at the end of my rope, I am."

"I see your point in a way, Clara, but, my God! a man's mother is his
mother! It's eating up my life just as it's eating yours, but what you
going to do about it? It just seems the best years of our life are
going, waiting for God knows what."

Hands clasped until her finger-nails whitened, Miss Bloom leaned across
the table, her voice careful and concentrated. "Now you said something!
That's why you and me are here alone together to-night. There's not
going to be a sixth year of this kind of waiting between us. Things have
got to come to a head. I've got a chance, Sam, to marry. Eddie Leonard
has asked me."

"I--thought so."

"Eddie Leonard ain't a Sam Lipkind, but after the war his
five-thousand-dollar job is down at Arnstein's waiting for him, and he's
got a good stiff bank-account saved as good as yours and--and no strings
to it. I believe in a girl facing those facts the same as any other
facts. Why, I--this war and all--why, if anything was to happen to you
to-morrow--us unmarried this way--I'd be left high and dry without so
much as a penny to show for the best five years of my life. We've got to
do one thing or another, Sam. I believe in a girl being practical as
well as romantic."

"I--see your point, Clara."

"I'm done with going around in this circle of ours."

"You mean--"

"You know what I mean."

The lower half of Mr. Lipkind's face seemed to lock, as it were, into a
kind of rigidity which shot out his lower jaw. "I'll see Eddie Leonard
burning like brimstone before I let him have you!"

"Well?"

"God! I don't know what to say--I don't know what to say!"

"That's your trouble, Sam; you're so chicken-hearted you--"

"My father died when I was five, Clara, and no matter what my feelings
are to you, there's no power on earth can make me quit having to be him
as well as a son to my mother. Maybe it sounds softy to you--but if I
got to pay with her happiness for--ours--then I never want happiness to
the day I die."

"In other words, it's the mother first."

"Don't put it that way--it's her--age--first. It ain't what she wants
and don't want; it's what she's got to have. My mother couldn't live
away from me."

"She could if you were called to war."

There was something electric in the silence that followed, something
that seemed to tighten the gaze of each for the other.

"But I haven't been--yet."

"The next draft will get you."

"Maybe."

"Well, what'll you do then?"

"That's something me and ma haven't ever discussed. The war hasn't been
mentioned in our house for two years--except that the letters don't come
from Germany, and that's a grief to her. There's enough time for her to
cross that bridge when we come to it. She worries about it enough."

"If I was a man I'd enlist, I would!"

"I'd give my right hand to. Every other night I dream I'm a lieutenant."

"Why, there's not a fellow I know that hasn't beaten the draft to it and
enlisted for the kind of service he wants. I know a half a dozen who
have got in the home guard and things and have saved themselves by
volunteering from being sent to France."

"I wouldn't dodge the front thataway. I'd like to enlist as a private
and then work myself up to lieutenant and then on up to captain and get
right into the fray on the front. I--"

"You bet, if I was a fellow, I'd enlist for the kind of home service I
wanted--that's what Eddie and all the fellows are doing."

"So would I, Clara, if I was what you call a--free man. There's nobody
given it more thought than me."

"Well, then, why don't you? Talk's cheap."

"You know why, Clara, to get back to going around in a circle again."

"But you've got to go, sooner or later. You've got a comfortable married
sister and independent circumstances of your own to keep your mother;
you haven't got a chance for exemption."

"I don't want exemption."

"Well, then, beat the draft to it."

"I--Most girls ain't so anxious to--to get rid of their best fellows,
Clara."

"Silly! Can't you see the point? If--if you'd enlist and go off to camp,
I--I could go and live near you there like Birdie Harberger does her
husband. See?"

"You mean--"

"Then--God forbid anything should happen to you!--I'm your wife. You
see, Sam?"

"Why, Clara--"

"You see what I mean. But nothing can happen this way, because if you
try to enlist in some mechanical department where they need you in this
country--you see, Sam? See?"

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.