Part 8

"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."