The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery

by Viola Brothers Shore

  “No!” replied Irving, lifting her from his lap and rising abruptly. “I told you before, we can’t afford it!”

  And he strode angrily into the house. When he saw her come into the living room after him he braced himself for a scene. He hated a scene and he would have done anything in the world to prevent one; anything except of course—if you gave a woman money every time she wept a little where would you land? To his surprise there was no scene. Quite amicably she came and sat beside him on the couch.

  “Irving,” she said, “did you really mean it when you said you couldn’t afford to draw more than forty dollars a week out of your business?”

  “Positively!”

  “And if you drew out more than that it would bankrupt you?”

  “I said if you begin drawing out more than you figger in your budget you’ll get in deeper and deeper and before you know it you’re bankrupted. Sure!”

  “Well then—”

  Bessie sighed once, gulped, and if Irving had been gifted with an extra sense he might have heard the splash of the Rubicon.

  “Irving, I’ve been wrong. I didn’t realize just how we were fixed. Now I understand. From now on I’m going to be different, Irving. From now on I’m going to save.”

  For a breath Irving was slightly staggered. For another breath he sought shrewdly the ebony-hued occupant of the woodpile. But at the third breath he fell. He smiled. He was at peace. Over the sore spot of Irving Apfel’s life was spread a beneficent ointment.

  It was the following night that Bessie met him at the door in a blue-and-white-checked bungalow apron.

  “Annie out?” he queried in surprise.

  “Annie’s gone.” And at his astonished look, “Yes, I didn’t have the money to raise her. And, anyway, I don’t think poor people like us can afford to keep a maid. I can manage fine without her.”

  He was vaguely troubled. He did not exactly approve of the step, but he said nothing. She must have worked hard, the kid, to fix up supper and all. Potato soup, fish, rice, beans, and chocolate pudding. He did not care much for fish and he never ate pudding—but he ate everything.

  “We have to have fish sometimes,” she explained. “Meat is a luxury these days and poor people like us can’t afford luxuries.”

  He had to laugh. His Bessie—the most spoiled girl in Brooklyn! You could see it was all in the bringing up. Her mother had spoiled her—always giving her everything she wanted. After supper he helped with the dishes.

  “We go with the Bendheims to the movies, don’t we?”

  “I had to call it off,” replied Bessie. “We have no one to leave with Ruthie, you know.”

  “Oh!” said Irving without enthusiasm. Then, struck by a new thought, “Do we have to stay home every night?”

  “Oh, no, mamma will come over and stay with Ruthie once every week or so.”

  “Oh!” said Irving with even less enthusiasm. They were in the habit of spending about six nights a week away from home. On the seventh there was usually company. Irving looked round his cozy living room, a troubled question in his eye. Nothing in the room in any way answered the question. He did not quite know what to do with himself. It was a little too cool to sit outdoors. He had never read a book in his life. He picked up the Millinery Guide and sank down on the loose-cushioned tapestry-upholstered couch. Bessie gave him the fleetingest of kisses on her way to the piano.

  For fifteen minutes he sat idly turning the pages of the Millinery Guide. Then he spoke.

  “Bessie,” he said, “can’t you play something else than those scales? It’s giving me a headache already.”

  “I’m sorry.” Bessie, reaching up for a volume of études was all sweet contrition. “You see, having all the work to do today, I didn’t get a chance to practice at all. And you wouldn’t want me to neglect my music, I know.”

  She played for two and a half hours, while Irving fell asleep on the tapestry-upholstered couch. At eleven she woke him and they went upstairs. He wound up the alarm clock with just a shade more force than it absolutely required. And when he pulled up the shade he snapped the string. Somehow into the beneficent ointment had crept the inevitable fly.

  It was a week later that he really felt compelled to say something to Bessie. He hated to do it, but fish three times in one week! Enough was plenty. And the night before there had been bread pudding—his particular hate.

  “Bessie,” he began as gently as he could, meaning to lead up to the subject of fish very tactfully, “how comes it we ain’t had no chicken since the fall of Jerusalem?”

  “Chicken!” Bessie jumped up to clear away the fish plates. “Chicken! Poor people like us can’t afford it.”

  “Th—th—listen to her! So poor we ain’t that once in a week we can’t have a little chicken.”

  “I should say not! I have my budget all worked out. And you know how it is—you have to stick to your figures. If you begin, a chicken here, a bottle of cream there, you get in deeper and deeper and before you know it—Look!” She set down the crumber and reached him something from behind the clock. “My bank book,” she explained. “I opened an account.”

  “It don’t seem possible,” remarked her husband. “What come over you?”

  “I told you the other night—I hadn’t realized before. I have to save. Especially as mamma won’t help me out any more.”

  She set the coffee tray on the table.

  “What’s for dessert?” inquired Irving.

  “Nothing,” replied Bessie. “Poor people have to do without desserts.”

  “Now looka here, Bessie, you could carry a good thing too far! To save a little is good, but to do without food—”

  “Oh, I’ll see that you always have plenty of food! I’m only going to cut down on luxuries. You see, I can’t spend more on food than my budget allows. I have to save.”

  “What you got to save for so much? What I give you you can spend.”

  “I should say not! Don’t I have to buy clothes when mine wear out? I can’t ask mamma for any more, and I won’t ask you for money. I know you give me all you can afford.

  “You see,” she went on, “if I’m very saving I’ll have a new suit by Easter. I’ll probably need it pretty bad by then. And meanwhile Ruthie ought to have a coat this winter and I’m saving for that first. When I think about shoes and hats and waists and underwear and everything—gee! I feel tempted to live on oatmeal and dried herring!”

  Irving said nothing about the fish. The time did not seem exactly propitious. But while drying the dishes he was rather thoughtful. He did not care for drying dishes—especially fourteen times in two weeks.

  Hanging the damp towel over the rack, he inquired suddenly, “Ain’t this the night for your mother to mind Ruthie?”

  “Mamma isn’t coming any more. I had a fight with her.”

  “What?”

  He followed her into the living room, where she switched on the light over the piano.

  “I never want to see her again after the things she said today about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Uh-huh! She as good as said you were a liar—that you weren’t hard up at all. She called you names—stingy and gut and oh, I just can’t tell you all! She said you had no right to let me do my own work, because you could easily afford to give me at least a hundred a week.”

  “She should mind her own business.”

  “That’s what I told her. I was furious. As if you’d let me do my own work if you could afford to pay for a girl—scrubbing floors and—”

  “You shouldn’t scrub floors, Bessie, really. You should hire a woman.”

  “At three-fifty a day? And let my child do without a winter coat to pay for it? I should say not! I’ll do my own work until we can afford—”

  Bessie had opened the piano and the rest of the sentence was lost in a noisy attack o
n C major. Irving started for his hat. “And she even said”—Bessie interrupted C major at the third flight—“that soon you’d begin going out without me and neglecting me.”

  Irving put his hat back in the closet. A few moments he stood irresolute, his hand on the closet door. Then struck by an idea, he crossed over to the piano.

  “Wouldn’t nobody—Katzes or nobody come over tonight?”

  “No, not a soul.”

  “Here then”—he laid fifty cents on the mahogany—“go to the movies. You ain’t been outside the house in a week.” Even, he could stand staying home, if not for the piano.

  Bessie fingered the silver meditatively.

  “Movies are a luxury,” she ventured at length. “Do you really think we can afford—”

  “Chammer!” He gave a short laugh. “Fifty cents I can afford!”

  “But your budget. You’re sure—”

  “Don’t talk nonsensical! Put on your hat!”

  In the hall Bessie paused, irresolute.

  “I’d rather not,” she sighed at length. “I wouldn’t enjoy it without you.” And she dropped the half dollar into the bank on the mantel.

  Somehow that simple act annoyed Irving out of all proportion to its size. Perhaps it was the very smallness of it that irritated. He gives her fifty cents, she should go to the movies. Not alone she don’t go, but she pockets yet the fifty cents. It’s all right a woman should be saving. But you know there’s a limit. Fifty cents it costs you to hear her play for an hour scales. Wouldn’t it give you the plotz?

  It was the next morning that Irving—having looked under the porch swing and down the steps and behind the rocker began to say unkind things about the newspaper boy.

  “Oh,” called Bessie from the kitchen, “don’t blame the boy, Irv! I cut off the order.”

  “You—”

  “Yes. You see, it’s ten cents a month extra for delivery and that’s a dollar-twenty a year. And besides I thought maybe you could pick one up in the train. People are always leaving them round on the seats.”

  The next day Irving, who was about to take a clean shirt from the drawer, gave an exasperated bark.

  “Bessie,” he called down the back stairs, “you got to change the laundry! You ought to see what them mommsers done to my shirt!”

  “Oh—”

  Bessie was making toast. Breakfast had ceased to be a joy to Irving since toast made of stale bread had been substituted for his fresh rolls at the same time that top-of-the-bottle replaced his cream, and eggs vanished almost entirely. “Oh,” said Bessie, sending her voice in the general direction of her irate lord, “it’s not the laundry! I stopped sending them to the laundry. I’m learning to do them myself.”

  “But give a look what you done with this!”

  “I know, dear, but I’ll learn.” She came and stood at the foot of the stairs. “Don’t you remember when I made my first dress and I cried because it was botched you said it wasn’t so bad—I shouldn’t get discouraged—any dumb dressmaker could make a dress and a smart girl like me surely could learn? And I did, so I’ll learn to press too. Any dumb wash woman can press. Poor people can’t afford laundries. Aren’t you coming down for breakfast, dear? I have lovely oatmeal, and the toast’ll all be cold.”

  “I be down soon,” said Irving in a licked sort of voice.

  That same night she told him, “I met Lennie Wolper today.”

  “Yeh? What did he have to say?”

  “He wanted to know when I was coming in to order that coat I looked at with mamma last month.”

  Irving became suddenly and deeply absorbed in the front page of the paper, which he had brought home three days before.

  “I explained to him,” went on his wife placidly, “that you couldn’t afford to buy me a coat.”

  “What?”

  “Well, isn’t that the truth?”

  “But d’you have to tell him?”

  “Well, should I lie? He asked me why didn’t I come down and I told him the truth. It’s not a disgrace not to be able to afford things, is it? It’s more disgrace to pretend that you can. If we’re not ashamed to let the neighbors see we can’t afford a girl, why should we be ashamed to tell Lennie Wolper we can’t afford fur coats?”

  “Bessie,” said Irving, “it can’t cost such a fortune to keep a girl. I maybe could give you the difference Annie raised you.”

  “I should say not! As long as I’m a poor man’s wife I’ll do my part.”

  “Bessie, don’t keep throwing in my teeth all the time I’m a schnorrerl I ain’t—”

  “People who live on a salary of forty dollars—like we do—are poor people. And poor people don’t need servants. And that’s all there is to it.”

  There was quite a cold spell the end of October. Bessie had failed to engage the furnace man—for a reason which Irving was getting just a bit weary of hearing. Irving was annoyed. The girl was getting nutty with her savings. People had to have a little something, at least a little comfort in their own house. He wasn’t going to be a furnace man. If she wanted to be so tight let her get up mornings and look after it herself—he wouldn’t. But in the end he did, because Bessie was so—well, he might as well call spades shippem—so damn stingy with the coal he couldn’t sit in his own parlor without his feet freezing off. Of course she could stand it. She wrapped her feet in a rug and banged the piano so hard it would keep circulation in a mummy. Probably the biggest, fattest fly in Irving’s ointment was that same mahogany upright which had so thrilled his soul when Bessie’s Uncle Mortie presented it to them as a wedding gift. The dish towel and the coal shovel and fried codfish also in no wise added to the sum of his joys.

  With November came the circus. Irving brought home three tickets. Every year it was his custom and pleasure to take his little daughter to the circus. Bessie would dress her in her best, which was very good indeed, and her proud father would take her downtown with him in the morning. How the enthusiastic and no longer young Miss Berger would gush at sight of the little vision! And how Irving would conceal beneath a strictly business air the satisfaction that made his chest to swell and his eyes to kindle! How he would be busy at his desk when Miss Berger kidnapped the wide-eyed little treasure and carried her off into the workroom! How he would frown at his mail as the little ecstatic cries drifted in to him through the open door! How she was growing, unberufen! And what a darling she was! She should live in good health. And what eyes she had—unbeschrieen, like the mamma’s.

  At noon Bessie would join them and he would escort them both to lunch before the performance. This year Bessie begged to be excused.

  “I’m so tired out—a whole day’s rest without Ruthie will do me more good. And Rosie Katz said wouldn’t you please take Marjorie? She can’t take her, but she’ll give me the money for the ticket.”

  Of course Irving wouldn’t say anything. But wasn’t it funny for Bessie, when he paid for the tickets, to take the money from Rosie Katz and put it in her bank? Wasn’t it funny a girl so fine in other ways could be so small about money?

  The Saturday of the circus Marjorie appeared at eight sharp in a beaver-colored coat with nutria trimmings and hat to match. She looked, unberufen, like an angel in heaven in that coat and hat. At least so Mrs. Monchik, of The Tots’ Shop, said after selling Mrs. Katz the coat. There was another coat of velvet with real beaver. Heaven knows what she would have looked like in that—only it was too much money.

  While Marjorie was still turning round for her host’s inspection Bessie sent down Ruthie, also hatted and coated and ready. Irving took one look at his daughter.

  “Bessie,” he called upstairs, “what’s the matter with Ruthie?”

  “With Ruthie?”

  “Yes—her coat! She looks something terrible!” Bessie came clattering down full of consternation. “I never saw the child looking like that! What’s the mat
ter with her? She looks like a scarecrow!”

  “Why, Irving, how can you talk that way about the baby? Maybe she hasn’t got a new coat, but that’s no reason for calling her names!”

  “But look how her arms are hanging out of the sleeves! And her legs are sticking out a mile!”

  “Well, she’s growing. I can’t put weights on her head. It’s a little short on her, I admit. But it’s not torn or anything.”

  “Well, I can’t take her out looking like such a nebesch—and that’s all! Go up and put something else on her.”

  “She has nothing else. I’m ashamed of you, Irving. To act that way about your child—and such a good child too! I never heard of a father being ashamed of his own child.”

  “I’m not ashamed of the child. I’m ashamed the way she looks—like such a poorhouse!”

  “Well, it’s no disgrace to be poor. And certainly the child can’t help it if you don’t make as much as Mannie Katz.”

  “Mannie Katz! Ha-ha! The cashier in my bank!”

  “Well, he must be making more money than you, anyway, because he gives Rosie sixty a week and his Christmas bonus. If you gave me sixty a week maybe we could af—”

  It was about here that the import of the conversation began to take root in the inner brain of Ruthie Apfel, who had been pondering. Of a sudden she set up a wail.

  “I want a new coat! I want a new coat! And a hat with fur—like Marjorie’s!”

  “Hush, mamma’s baby! Don’t cry! The poor child! It breaks my heart to hear her cry. If we could afford it I’d tell you to stop off at Monchik’s on the way in and buy her a coat.”

  “Where is Monchik’s?”

  “Ruthie knows. But I wouldn’t hear of it. We can’t af—”

  “Bessie, I—I was going to surprise you. I got a big order yesterday. I’ll make a good profit on it. The child could have a coat—she shouldn’t look like a joke paper.”

  “But, Irving! Your budget!”

  “Pff!” He made a magnificent gesture.

  “Oh, Irving, I’m afraid you’re inclined to be extravagant! This coat isn’t worn out yet.”