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Humoresque

F >> Fannie Hurst >> Humoresque




"I--see."

"Your mother would have to get used to things then, Sam--it would be the
easiest for her. An old lady like her couldn't go trailing around the
outskirts of a camp like your wife could. Think of the comfort it'll be
to her to have me with you if she can't be. She'll get so used
to--living alone--"

"I--You mustn't talk that way to me, Clara. When I'm called to serve my
country, I'm the first one that will want to go. I've given more money
already than I can afford to help the boys who are at the front. So far
as I'm concerned, enlisting like this with--with you--around, would be
the happiest thing ever happened to me, but--well, you see for
yourself."

"You mean, then, you won't?"

"I mean, Clara, I can't."

She was immediately level of tone again and pushed back, placing her
folded napkin beside her place, patting it down.

"Well, then, Sam, I'm done."

"'Done,' Clara?"

"Yep. That lets me out. I've given you every chance to make this thing
possible. Your mother is no better and no different than thousands and
thousands of other mothers who are giving their sons, only, she is
better off than most, because she's provided for. It's all right for a
fellow's mother to come first, maybe, but if his wife isn't even to
come second or third or tenth, then it's about time to call quits. I
haven't made up my mind to this in a day. I'm done."

"Clara--"

"Ed has asked me. I don't pretend he's my ideal, but he's more concerned
about my future than he is about anybody else's. If I'm ready to leave
with him on that twelve-o'clock train for Boston to-morrow, where he's
going to be put in the clerical corps at Camp Usonis, we'll be married
there to-morrow night, and I'll settle down somewhere near camp as long
as I can. He's got a good nest-egg if--God forbid!--anything should
happen. That's the whole thing in a nutshell."

"My God! Clara, this is awful! Eddie Leonard he's not your kind; he--"

"I've given you first chance, Sam. That proves how you stand with me. A
one! Ace high! First! Nobody can ever take your place with me. Don't be
a boob coming and going, Sam; you're one now not to see things and
you'll be another one spelled backward if you don't help yourself to
your chance when it comes. You've got your life in front of you, and
your mother's got hers in back of her. Now choose."

"My God! Clara, this is--terrible! Why--I'd rather be a thousand boobs
than take my mother's heart and tear it to pieces."

"You won't?"

"I can't."

"Don't say that, Sam. Go home and--sleep on it. Think it over. Please!
Come to your senses, honey. Telephone me at eleven to keep me from
catching that twelve-o'clock train. Don't let me take it with Eddie.
Think it over, Sam. Honey--our--future--don't throw it away! Don't let
me take that twelve-o'clock train!"

There were tears streaming from her eyes, and her lips, so carefully
firm, were beginning to tremble. "You can't blame a girl, Sam, for
wanting to provide for her future. Can you, Sam? Think it over. Please!
I'll be praying when eleven o'clock comes to-morrow morning for you to
telephone me. Please, Sam--think!"

He dropped his face low, lower toward the table, trembling under the red
wave that surged over him and up into the roots of his hair. "I'll think
it over, Clara--my girl--my own girl!"

As if the moments themselves had been woven by her flying amber needles
into a whole cloth of meditation, Mrs. Lipkind, beside a kitchen lamp
that flowed in gracious light, knitted the long, quiet hours of her
evening into fabric, her face screwed and out of repose and occasionally
the lips moving. Age is prone to that. Memories love to be mumbled and
chewed over--the unconscious kind of articulation which comes with the
years and for which youth has a wink and a quirk.

A tiger cat with overfed sides and a stare that seemed to doze purred on
the window-ledge, gold and unswerving of eye. The silence was like the
singing inside of a shell, and into it rocked Mrs. Lipkind.

By nine o'clock she was already glancing up at the clock, cocking her
head to each and every of night's creaks.

By half after nine there were small and frequent periods of peering
through cupped hands down into a street so remote that its traffic had
neither shape nor identity. Once she went down a long slit of hallway to
the front door, opening it and gazing out upon a fog-filled corridor
that was papered in embossed leatherette, one speckled incandescent bulb
lighting it sadly. There was something impregnable, even terrible to her
in the featureless stare of the doors of three adjoining apartments. She
tiptoed, almost ran, poor dear! with the consciousness of some one at
her heels, back to the kitchen, where at least was the warm print of the
cat's presence; fell to knitting again, clacking her needles for the
solace of explainable sound.

Identically with the round moment of ten Mr. Lipkind entered, almost
running down the hallway.

"Hello, ma! Think I got lost? Just got to talking and didn't realize.
Haven't been worried, ma? Afraid?"

She lifted her head from his kiss. "'Afraid!' What you take me for? For
why should I be worried at only ten o'clock? Say, I'm glad if you stay
out for recreation."

He kissed her again, shaking out of his coat and unwinding his muffler.
"I could just see you walking the floor and looking out of the window."

"Sa-y, I been so busy all evening I didn't have time to think. I'm not
such a worrier no more like I used to be. Like the saying is--life is
too short."

He drew up beside her, lifting her needles off her work. "Little
sweetheart mamma, why don't you sit on the big sofa in the front room
where it's more comfortable?"

"You can't make, Sammy, out of a pig's ear a silk stocking."

He would detain her hands, his eyes puckered and, so intent upon her.

"You had a good time, Sammy?"

"You'd be surprised, ma, what a nice place Clara boards at."

"What did they have to eat? Good cooking?"

"Not for a fellow that's used to my boarding-house."'

"What?"

"I couldn't tell if it was soup or finger-bowls they served for the
first course."

"I know--stylish broth. Let me warm you up a little of my thick barley
soup that's left over from--"

He pressed her down. "Please, ma! I'm full up. I couldn't. They had pink
ice-cream, too, with pink cake and--"

"Such mess-food what is bad for you. I'm surprised how Clara keeps her
good complexion. Let me fix you some fried--"

"Ma, I tell you I couldn't. It's ten o'clock. You mustn't try to fatten
me up so. In war-time a man has got to be lean."

She sat back suddenly and whitely quiet. "That's--twice already to-day,
Sam, you talk like that."

He took up her lax hand, moving each separate finger up and down, eyes
lowered. "Why not? Doesn't it ever strike you, mamma, that you and me
are--are kidding ourselves along on this war business, pretending to
each other there ain't no war?"

She laid a quick hand to her breast. "What you mean, Sammy?"

"Why, you know what I mean, ma. I notice you read the war news pretty
closely, all right."

"Sammy, you mean something!"

"Now, ma, there's no need to get excited right away. Think of the
mothers who haven't even got bank-accounts whose sons have got to go."

"Sammy--you 'ain't been--"

"No, no; I haven't."

"You have! I can see it in your face! You've come home with some news to
break. You been drafted!"

He held her arms to her sides, still pressing her down to her chair. "I
tell you I haven't! Can't you take my word for it?"

"Swear to me, Sammy!"

"All right; I swear."

"Swear to me on your dead father who is an angel in heaven!"

"I swear--thataway."

She was still pressing against her breathing. "You're keeping something
back. Sammy, is it that we got mail from Germany? From Aunt Carrie? Bad
news--O my God!"

"No! No! Who could I get mail from there any more than you've been
getting it for the last two years? Mamma, if you're going to be this
excitable and get yourself sick, I won't talk over anything with you.
I'll quit."

"You got something, Sammy, to break to me. I can read you like a book."

"I'm done. If I can't talk facts over with you without your going to
pieces this way, I'm done. I quit."

She clasped her hands, her face pleading up to him. "Sammy, what is it?
If you don't tell me, I can't stand it. Sammy?"

"Will you sit quiet and not get excited?"

"Please, Sammy, I will."

"It's this: you see, ma, the way the draft goes. When a fellow's called
to war, drafted, he's got to go, no questions asked. But when a fellow
enlists for war, volunteers, you see, before the government calls him,
then thataway he can pick out for himself the thing he wants to be in
the army. Y'see? And then maybe the thing he picks out for himself can
keep him right here at home. Y'see, ma--so he don't have to go away. See
the point?"

"You mean when a boy enlists he offers himself instead of gets offered."

"Exactly."

"You got something behind all this. You mean you--you want to enlist."

"Now, ma--you see, if I was to enlist--and stay right here in this
country--with you near the camp or, as long as it's too rough life for
you, with--with Clara there--a woman to look in on--"

"Sammy--you mean it's enlistment!"

Her voice rose in velocity; he could feel her pulse run beneath his
fingers.

"It's the best way, ma. The draft is sure to get me. Let me beat it and
keep myself home--near you. We might as well face the music, ma. They'll
get me one way or another. Let me enlist now, ma. Like a man. Right
away. For my country!"

Do you know the eyes of Bellini's "Agony in a Garden"? Can you hear for
yourself the note that must have been Cassandra's when she shouted out
her forebodings? There were these now in the glance and voice of Mrs.
Lipkind as she drew back from him, her face actually seeming to shrivel.

"No, Sammy! No! No! No!"

"Ma--please--"

"You wouldn't! You couldn't! No, Sammy--my son!"

"Ma, for God's sake don't go on so!"

"Then tell me you wouldn't! Against your own flesh and blood! Tell me
you wouldn't!"

"No, no, ma! For God's sake, don't take a fit--a stroke--no, no; I
wouldn't--I wouldn't!"

"Your own blood, Sammy! Your own baby cousins what I tucked you in bed
with--mine own sister's children! Her babies what slept with you. Mine
own sister who raised me and worked down her hands to the bone to make
it so with my young husband and baby we could come to America--no--no!"

"Mamma, for God's sakes--"

"Three years like a snake here inside of it's eating me--all night--all
day--I'm a good American, Sammy; I got so much I should be thankful
for to America. Twenty-five years it's my home, the home where I had
prosperity and good treatment, the home where I had happiness with your
papa and where he lies buried, but I can't give you to fight against my
own, Sammy--to be murdered by your own--my sister what never in her life
harmed a bird--my child and her children--cousins--against each other.
My beautiful country what I remember with cows and green fields and
clover--always the smell of clover. It ain't human to murder against
your own flesh and blood for God knows what reason!"

"Mamma, there is a reason it--"

"I tell you I'm a good American, Sammy. For America I give my last cent,
but not to stick knives in my own--it ain't human--Why didn't I die
before we got war? What good am I here? In my boy's way for his
country--his marriage--his happiness--why don't I die?"

"Ma, I tell you you mustn't! You're making yourself sick. Let me fan
you. Here, ma, I didn't mean it. See--I'm holding you tight. I won't
never let go. You're my little sweetheart mamma. You mustn't tremble
like that. I'm holding you tight--tight--little mamma."

"My boy! My little boy! My son! My all! All in their bed together.
Three. Her two. Mine. The smell of clover--my boy--Sammy--Sam--" She
fainted back into his arms suddenly, very white and very quiet and very
shriveled.

He watched beside her bed the next five hours of the night, his face so
close above hers that, when she opened her eyes, his were merged into
one for her, and the clasp of his hand never left hers.

"You all right, ma? Sure? Sure you don't need the doctor?"

She looked up at him with a tired, a burned-out, an ashamed smile. "The
first time in my life, Sammy, such a thing ever happened to me."

He pressed a chain of close kisses to the back of her hand, his voice
far from firm. "It was me, ma. I'll never forgive myself. My little
mamma, my little mamma sweetheart!"

"I feel fine, son; only, with you sitting here all night, you don't let
me sleep for worry that you ain't in bed."

"I love it. I love to sit here by you and watch you sleep. You're sure
you've no fever? Sure?"

"I'm well, Sammy. It was nothing but what you call a fainting-fit. For
some women it's nothing that they should faint every time they get a
little bit excited. It's nothing. Feel my hands--how cool! That's always
a sign--coolness."

He pressed them both to his lips, blowing his warm breath against them.

"There now--go to sleep."

The night-light burning weakly, the great black-walnut bedstead
ponderous in the gloom, she lay there mostly smiling and always
shamefaced.

"Such a thing should happen to me at my age!"

"Try to sleep, ma."

"Go in your room to bed, and then I get sleep. Do you want your own
clerks should beat you to business to-morrow?"

"A little whisky?"

"Go away; you got me dosed up enough with such _Schnapps_."

"The light lower?"

"No. If you don't go in your room, I lay here all night with my eyes
open, so help me!"

He rose, stiff and sore-kneed, hair awry, and his eyes with the red rims
of fatigue. "You'll sure ring the little bell if you want anything, ma?"

"Sure."

"You promise you won't get up to fix breakfast."

"If I don't feel good, I let you fix mine."

"Good night, little sweetheart mamma."

"You ain't--mad at me, Sam?"

"Mad! Why, ma, you mustn't ask me a--a thing like that; it just kills me
to hear you. Me that's not even fit to black your shoes! Mad at you?
Why, I--I--Good night--good--night--ma."

* * * * *

At just fifteen minutes before seven, to the pungency of coffee and the
harsh sing of water across the hall, Mrs. Lipkind in a fuzzy wrapper the
color of her eyes and hair, kissed her son awake.

"Sam! Sammy! Get up! _Thu, thu_! I can't get him up in the morning!"

The snuggle away and into the crotch of his elbow.

"Sam-my--quarter to seven!"

He sprang up then, haggard, but in a flood of recollection and remorse.
"Ma, I must 'a' dropped off at the last minute. You all right? What are
you doing up? Go right back! Didn't I tell you not to get up?"

"I been up an hour already; that's how fine I feel. Get up, Sammy; it's
late."

He flung on his robe, trying to withdraw her from the business of
looping back the bed-clothing over the footboard and pounding into
the pillows.

"I tell you I won't have it! You got to lay in bed this morning."

"I'm all right, Sammy. Wouldn't I say so if I wasn't?" But she sat down
rather weakly on the edge of the bed, holding the right side of her,
breathing too hard.

"I--I shouldn't have beat that pillow is all. Let me get my breathing.
I'm all right." Nevertheless, she let him relax her to his pillow, draw
the covers down from the footboard, and cover her.

"This settles it," he said, quietly. "I'm going to get a doctor."

She caught his hand. "If--if you want to get me excited for sure, just
you call a doctor--now--before I talk with you a minute--I want to
talk--I'm all right, Sammy, if you let me talk to you. One step to that
telephone, and I get excited--"

"Please, ma--"

"Sammy?"

"Yes."

"Will you listen to me and do like I want it?"

"Yes."

"I--been a bad old woman."

"That's right--break my heart."

"I got a brave boy for a son, and I want to make from him a coward."

"Ma--please!"

"I laid saying to myself all night, a mother should have such a son like
mine and make things hard for him yet!"

"Please, get it all out of your head--"

"From America what has given to me everything I should hold back my son
from fighting for. In war, it ain't your own flesh and blood what
counts; it's the flesh and blood of your country--not, Sam? I been
thinking only it's my family affair. If God lets be such a terrible
thing like war, there is somewhere a good reason for it. I want you to
enlist, Sammy, for your country. Not for in an office, but for where
they need you. I want you to enlist to get some day to be such a
lieutenant and a captain like you used to play it with tin soldiers.
I want--"

"Mamma, mamma, you know you don't mean it!"

"I want it, I tell you. All night I worked on it how dumb I've been, not
right away to see it--last night. With Clara near you in the camp--"

"Ma, I didn't mean it that way; I--"

"Clara near you for a woman to look in on, I been so dumb not to right
away see it. I'm glad you let it out, Sam. I wouldn't take five thousand
dollars it didn't happen--I feel fine--I want it--I--"

"I didn't mean it, ma--I swear! Don't rub it in this
way--please--please--"

"Why, I never wanted anything in my life like I want this, Sammy--that
you should enlist--a woman to look in on--I been a bad woman, Sammy,
I--I--oh--"

It was then that Mr. Lipkind tore to the telephone, his hands so
frenzied that they would not properly hold the receiver.

At eight o'clock, and without even a further word, Mrs. Lipkind breathed
out quietly, a little tiredly, and yet so eloquent of eye. To her son,
pleading there beside her for the life she had not left to give, it was
as if the swollen bosom of some stream were carrying her rapidly but
gently down its surface, her gaze back at him and begging him to stay
the current.

"Mamma! Darling! Doctor--please--for God's sakes--please--she wants
something---she can't say it--give it to her! Try to make her tell me
what she wants--she wants something--this is terrible--don't let her
want something--mamma--just one word to me--try--try--O my
God--Doctor--"

A black arm then reached down to withdraw him from the glazed stare
which had begun to set in from the pillow.

By ten o'clock a light snow had set in, blowing almost horizontally
across the window-pane. He sat his second hour there in a rather forward
huddle beside the drawn shade of that window, the _sotto-voce_ comings
and goings, all the black-coated _parvenus_ that follow the wake of
death, moving about him. A clock shaped like a pilot's wheel, a boyhood
property which had marked the time of twenty years, finally chimed the
thin, tin stroke of eleven and after a swimming, nebulous interval,
twelve. He glanced up each time with his swollen eyes, and then almost
automatically out to the wall telephone in the hall opposite the open
door. But he did not move. In fact, for two more hours sat there
impervious to proffered warmth of word or deed. Meanwhile, the snow
behind the drawn shade had turned to rain that beat and washed
against the pane.

Just so the iciness that had locked Samuel Lipkind seemed suddenly to
melt in a tornado of sobs that swept him, felled him into a prostration
of the terrible tears that men weep.

At a training-camp--somewhere--from his side of a tent that had flapped
like a captive wing all through a wind-swept night, Lieutenant Lipkind
stirred rather painfully for a final snuggle into the crotch of an elbow
that was stiff with chill and night damp.

Out over the peaked city that had been pitched rather than built, and on
beyond over the frozen stubble of fields, sounded the bugle-cry of the
reveille, which shrills so potently:

I can't get 'em up; I can't get 'em up;
I can't get 'em up in the morn--ing!




EVEN AS YOU AND I

There is an intensity about September noonday on Coney Island, aided and
abetted by tin roofs, metallic façades, gilt domes, looking-glass
fronts, jeweled spires, screaming peanut and frankfurter-stands, which
has not its peculiar kind of equal this side of opalescent Tangiers.
Here the sea air can become a sort of hot camphor-ice to the cheek, the
sea itself a percolator, boiling up against a glass surface. Beneath the
tin roofs of Ocean Avenue the indoor heat takes on the kind of intense
density that is cotton in the mouth and ringing in the ears.

At one o'clock the jibberwock exteriors of Ocean Avenue begin fantastic
signs of life. The House of Folly breaks out, over its entire façade,
into a chicken-pox of red and green, blue and purple, yellow, violet,
and gold electric bulbs. The Ocean Waves concession begins its
side-splitting undulations. Maha Mahadra, India's foremost soothsayer
(down in police, divorce, and night courts as Mamie Jones, May Costello,
and Mabel Brown, respectively), loops back her spangled portière. The
Baby Incubator slides open its ticket-windows. Five carousals begin to
whang. A row of hula-hula girls in paper necklaces appears outside of
"Hawaii," gelatinously naughty and insinuating of hip. There begins a
razzling of the razzle-dazzle. Shooting-galleries begin to snipe into
the glittering noon, and the smell of hot spiced sausages and stale malt
to lay on the air.

Before the Palace of Freaks, a barker slanted up his megaphone, baying
to the sun:

"Y-e-a-o-u! Y-e-a-o-u! The greatest show on the Island! Ten cents to see
the greatest freak congress in the world. Shapiro's freaks are gathered
from every corner of the universe. Enter and shake hands with Baron de
Ross, the children's delight, the world's smallest human being; age,
forty-two years, eight months; height, twenty-eight inches; weight,
fourteen and one-half pounds, certified scales. Enter and see the
original and only authentic Siamese Twins! The Ossified Man! You are
cordially invited to stick pins into this mystery of the whole medical
world. Jastrow, the world's most famous strong man end glass-eater, will
perform his world-startling feats. Show about to begin! Our glass-eater
eats glass, not rock candy--any one doubting same can sample it first.
We have on view within, and all included in your ten-cents admission,
the famous Teenie, absolutely the heaviest woman in captivity. We
guarantee Teenie to tip the certified scales at five hundred and
fifty-five, a weight unsurpassed by any of the heavyweights in the
history of the show business. Come in and fox-trot with Teenie, the
world wonder. Come in and fox-trot with her. Show begins immediately.
Y-e-a-o-u! Y-e-a-o-u!"

Within the Palace of Freaks, her platform elevated and railed in
against the unduly curious, Miss Luella Hoag, all that she was so
raucously purported to be, sat back in her chair, as much in the
attitude of relaxing as her proportions would permit.

There is no way in which I can hope to salve your offended estheticisms
with any of Miss Hoag's better points. What matters it that her skin was
not without the rich quality of cream too thick to pour, when her arms
fairly dimpled and billowed of this creaminess, and above her rather
small ankles her made-to-order red-satin shoes bulged over of it, the
low-cut bosom of her red and sequin dress was a terrific expanse of it,
her hands small cushions of it, her throat quivery, and her walk a
waddle with it. All but her face; it was as if the suet-like inundation
of the flesh had not dared here. The chin was only slightly doubled; the
cheeks just a shade too plump. Neither was the eye heavy of lid or sunk
down behind a ridge of cheek. Between her eyes and upper lip, Miss Hoag
looked her just-turned twenty; beyond them, she was antediluvian,
deluged, smothered beneath the creamy billows and billows of self.

And yet, sunk there like a flower-seed planted too deeply to push its
way up to bloom, the twenty-year-old heart of Miss Hoag beat beneath its
carbonaceous layer upon layer, even skipped a beat at spring's
palpitating sweetness, dared to dream of love, weep of desire, ache of
loneliness and loveliness.

Isolated thus by the flesh, the spirit, too, had been caught in
nature's sebaceous trick upon Miss Hoag. Life had passed her by slimly.
But Miss Hoag's redundancy was not all literal. A sixth and saving sense
of humor lay like a coating of tallow protecting the surface of her. For
nature's vagary, she was pensioned on life's pay-roll at eighteen
dollars a week.

"Easy money, friends," Miss Hoag would _ad lib_. to the line-up outside
her railing; "how would some of you like to sit back and draw your wages
just for the color of your hair or the size of your shoes? You there,
that sailor boy down there, how'd you like to have a fox-trot with
Teenie? Something to tell the Jackies about. Come on, Jack Tar, I'm
light on my feet, but I won't guarantee what I'll be on yours. Step up
and have a round."

Usually the crowd would turn sheepish and dissolve at this Terpischorean
threat. In fact, it was Miss Hoag's method of accomplishing just that.

In the August high noon of the Coney Island Freak Palace, which is the
time and scene of my daring to introduce to you the only
under-thirty-years, and over-one-hundred-and-thirty-pounds, heroine in
the history of fiction, the megaphone's catch of the day's first dribble
of humanity and inhumanity had not yet begun its staring,
gaping invasion.

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