Part 7

Snow smother, as if the morning had taken a deep breath and could not let go. Almost the odor of Sunday, because not even the milk carts were able to be abroad and, opening the dumb-waiter a spiral of snow flew up like a jack-in-the-box and hit Bertha a good morning.

A white hearse of a day. Ice tesselated.

There were no breakfast rolls on the dumb-waiter and before Julie and Lulu came down to clutter up the silence with talk, she began to mix biscuit, squatting with the bowl caught between her knees, her fingers webbing up with dough.

Presently, early even for him, and cautiously, before the arrival of Lulu and Julie, Mr. Musliner came in. She wanted somehow not to have to look at him, and could feel the ox-blood color of her flush as she bent low over her mixing.

His shoes were brown with tan uppers and she could almost see in them a new firm planting on the ground as he stood there before her.

Pride of the male.

"Bertha." he said, and clearing his throat slid his hand down into his right pocket.

She wanted to help him and his scorching discomfort, but her eyes were glued as if by the dough and would not lift.

"Bertha--I--Mrs. Musliner is very much better this morning."

"Yah--so."

"A little nervousness last night--you understand. Over tired. Bad dreams--quite recovered this morning."

"Yah--yah--so--"

"... closing up the place here and taking a trip to Europe for the change--nervous--needs a rest."

"Yah--yah--so? What?"

"... might be easier if you would leave here immediately--before she has occasion to see you again. You understand--nervous condition--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

"Extra month's wages--references--good girl--but after what has happened, embarrassing for all--you understand--going to Europe anyhow--good girl--go now, before Mrs. Musliner awakens--good girl--extra month's wages--"

"Yah--yah--so--"

***

The day might have been a spark struck off clashing steel, so coldly blue it met Bertha.

Almost immediately her fingers began to ache around the handle of her carpetbag and she could feel the wire-stemmed rose on her hat thridding with still-cold.

It was like being awakened out of a warm dream. For a moment she could not place where she was. What next? Which way? Nothing to suggest traffic. A white nun of a day standing impasse to the march of the city.

An early bird of a boy, a demon with the joy of the storm, flung a snowball at her, missing her so closely that she could taste the whizz.

"Hello, Square-Head! Square-Head!" And then as the thin air passed it along and along after her as she hurried: "Hello, Sq-q-uare Head--Sq-q-quare Head."

The wind had a long whizz to it. Zeouw! It raced around corners, so that it struck her broadsides and jerked her breath away. It rose up under her hat and set it on end like a plate on a juggler's brow. It sent up spiral snow ghosts in front of her and blew flurries of them into her mouth. It caught at her skirts and tore up under, chapping her knees. It tweaked her ears until the lobes were red and swollen and shiny. Zeouw! The Inverness cape went up over her head like an inside out umbrella and her skirts blew forward and the outline of her big legs sprang out. A gilt boot over a cobbler's shop blew down and grazed her by an inch. She was winded and twisted and the carpetbag hooked into burningly cold fingers when she finally staggered into a drug store. There was a pot-bellied stove with an iron fence around it. Her flesh began to sing. She cupped her hands against the warm, sheet-iron fence. All ten of her fingers, little bells ringing. Tears of cold, that the wind had lashed to her cheeks, started to thaw and run down. She began to fumble for her handkerchief with the ten bells of fingers that would not stop ringing.

The chemist, holding a measuring glass to the light and dripping into it a colorless liquid from a large bottle, glanced up and shrugged softly in his seersucker coat.

"Worst blizzard in ten years."

"Yah," she said, with her mouth full of the chattering dice of her teeth.

"Where you going? You won't get a train out of this town to-day. Worst tie-up in ten years."

"No. No. I got to go down to Front Street."

"Front Street? Docks, huh? You have as much chance getting down to Front Street as a duck has of swimming through snowdrifts."

"I got to go," she said.

He looked at her over his glasses. He had a Yankee face with a kick-up of beard.

"Where are you going, back to the old country?"

"Back? I've never been."

"Aint's you a Finn or something? You look as foreign to me as a samovar. Got some foreign streaks in you, I'll wager."

"Many--but I don't know--all mixed--."

"Melting pot--eh? Well, it's a bad morning to have going anywhere on your mind. Worst in ten years."

"I'm yoost changing places."

"Oh--housework?"

"Cook mostly."

"Whose firing a good, hefty girl like you on such a morning?"

"Not fired. I got references."

"Say, I have a customer over on Fifty-eighth Street needs a cook--worst way! Small family. Good wages. I'm putting up these aromatic spirits now for the old woman. You might take it over for me and size up the place. Want the address--good folks?"

"If you will please be so good--."

He ran his tongue over a label, smacking it on to the bottle. "No slip-ups on the way over. I'm taking a chance on you. My delivery boy wouldn't miss the chance of staying away for a snowstorm like this if he lived upstairs. Here's the name and address--."

She took the slip with her thick numbed fingers.

"Wall-en-stein--."

"Just around the corner. Tell them I sent you. He's the owner of the Sample Shoe Store on Thirty-fourth Street."

She felt it incumbent upon her to purchase something, her eyes roving along the shiny convex surface of a glass case. Rows of scented toilet soaps shaped like the bodies of birds and made to cut softly into the water. Perfumes. Bottle after bottle, the fragrance throttled down with white membranous hoods. Sponges with gaping thirsty little mouths. Things. Things that were sweet to the flesh. Bertha had never owned of them.

"I'll have that," she said and pointed down into the case. It did not matter.

"You don't want to buy anything," he said, and reached in for a cake of the soap, slipping it into her hand. "I don't want you to take something just to be polite. Have that on me. You're a nice girl. They'll be lucky to get you. Wish I could afford you for the wife. Don't forget the package."

She picked up her bag.

"Want to leave it here--in case--"

"Oh no," she said, "I don't mind," and curving her sore fingers again about the handle, went out.

The wind met her with a swoop and a yell, standing her hat again up on end. She bent into it, baring her teeth with the effort. The elliptical shaped bar of soap was in her palm. It had pleasant dimension. The smooth little blob of soap, shaped as an egg would feel if it came whole out of your mouth.

***

The Wallensteins, where Bertha was to remain several years, lived on the fifth floor. There were two middle-aged men in uniform in the lower foyer, and pressed leatherette walls with grape-and-leaf design embossed into them. What was really a small black onyx fountain in the center of the lower hall was kept filled with artificial daisies, and odds and ends belonging to the elevator men were surreptitiously tucked under the cotton moss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"By God--"

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

"By God--you--"

"Ah--ow--"

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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