Chaim’s son Ralph after a while came forward of his own accord to help with his mother’s hospital bill. It turned out that he had been out of town on a business trip for several weeks and had not known of his mother’s illness. Chaim could not hide his grudging satisfaction. “As a son,” he admitted, “he isn’t all bad.” And he could not help smiling when he said this. “But we had an argument,” Chaim continued soberly. “He told me I should stop going to the abattoir. It doesn’t behoove him to have a father who has to work in an abattoir. Well, it doesn’t behoove me to have a son who…” Chaim mumbled something and let his hand finish the sentence. “I said to him, ‘When you stop living in a hotel and go back to your family I’ll stop working in the slaughterhouse.’ ”
Chaim stroked his beard and seemed surprised at himself. He had never been so firm with any of his children before. That sort of thing he had usually left to his wife. It took a crisis to bring out the lion in a man. “That’s not all I told him. I didn’t give him a chance to cheek me before I got my word in. I said to him, ‘All right, you go and live in hotels, leave your wife to bring up your child, let your reputation be chewed over by a million mouths. You go your way, and I’ll go mine. Remember, me you haven’t given anything. You paid your mother’s bill – all right, your mother thanks you. You don’t care what you do to your father’s name, so you don’t care about your father!’ That’s what I told him.”
Chaim sighed. “You can understand he was very angry. I really didn’t want to drive him away from me altogether.”
“Don’t worry,” Abraham reassured him. “He can see what you’ve lived through these past few weeks. And he’ll see that his old father was right yet. You won’t drive him away.”
“You think so, eh? Of course. Maybe I should have started to be firm with him long ago. It’s a little late now that he’s a man with a family himself.”
“You can’t tell,” said Abraham. “Afterward it’s hard to tell. I’ve often thought that if I had been a little firmer with my sons when they were young they wouldn’t have been so anxious to come home and see us in the holy days. Just a little bit harsher, perhaps, and they would have been content to stay where they were instead of rushing home. But the truth is that afterward what might have been doesn’t matter, except as a dream. The wheel will turn again, your Ralph will go home to his wife, your wife will get well. You’ll dance with her yet at my Isaac’s wedding.”
“God willing,” said Chaim.
—
The wedding was closer than Abraham had thought. What was the use, Isaac was thinking, of waiting any longer? Ruth was as good as his wife already. If they tried to outwait this slump they would both be old before they married. In the meantime he was just avoiding his responsibility by not taking Ruth to be his wife, into his home where she belonged. She didn’t belong with the married sister and her husband, who didn’t really want her or need her as he did. She had always known, in that way she had of feeling things, that they had taken her and brought her up because it was a duty. They had their own children to love. Ruth could remember a lifetime of trying to edge into the warmth of this love by taking care of these children. He had told her that she didn’t have to earn his love, or his parents’. It was there for her, only for her. She would never have to stand in the shadows again. And that was true. He needed her. A depression can’t dictate to a man what his needs are, not when his need is Ruth. Ever since he had met her he had wanted to take her away from her sister, to bring her home.
Why didn’t he? Isaac admitted to himself that he was afraid, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to support her, to do for her all those things that he wanted to do but didn’t know how, afraid that he would disappoint her, afraid, he didn’t know of what, as he so often was when it came to making a decision, unless he made it quickly, without thinking. Would she even want him if she knew of all his fears? She thought she knew him, and he tried to tell her about himself, but she really didn’t, because she didn’t feel his fears as he felt them. Well, in a way that was good. It was enough that he knew. She must know only the man he would like to be. It was not that he wanted to fool her, but rather to become the person she thought she knew. The man he wanted to be was not afraid of a depression or of a responsibility.
“Ruth,” he brought out one day when they were sitting in the living room. Sarah had tactfully closed the door between them and the kitchen. “Ruth,” he repeated, licking his lips, which had gone dry. “Don’t you think we should get married soon? If you want, I mean.” This last had not even occurred to him before. Did she want? He looked anxiously into her face. What he saw there reassured him. He felt a great relief, a sudden delight with himself, with Ruth, with the idea. He had not thought that she was as anxious as he – Isaac smudged the tears on her face awkwardly with his hand – the way she had talked, so practically, about jobs and money.
“Of course we must,” began Isaac after a long interval during which they rediscovered that they really must. “We must” – Isaac liked to try his hand at fancy English phrases – “legalize this debauchery.” As always, Ruth laughed, this time almost hysterically.
“I had a feeling when I got up today. I had a feeling; it made me so nervous all day.”
Giggling a little, they began to tidy themselves up and prepared to burst open the kitchen door and make their announcement. There would have to be much discussion yet, about arrangements and dates. When they were tidy they paused to look at each other. Later in the evening they made their announcement.
—
The months melted away like the snow on the ground. Lingering bits of muddy ice still lay about in shady spots, but in the sunny places green was sprouting from the earth. The wedding was an affair, both Abraham and Chaim considered, to be remembered. Not that it was such a big wedding, for they did not know so many people in the city, but it was a wedding!
“Aha!” said Chaim Knopp when he talked of it. “Aha aha aha!”
Because Ruth was an orphan and the married sister with whom she lived was not a rich woman and had as well a family to look after, and because Ruth in the past year or so had become as a child in his own house, Abraham considered that he should treat the affair not only as though he was marrying off his son but also as though he were marrying off his daughter at the same time. This was one of the excuses that he gave for ordering twice as much of everything as was considered necessary by anyone else. It would be months, he told himself happily, before he could finish paying off the expenses of this wedding. Well, it would happen only once. Let it at least try to make up for three.
At the wedding feast he presided like a king. His forked beard, which was generously threaded with silver, shone against the navy blue of his new serge suit. He was not ashamed to admit afterward that he too partook of the drink that he urged upon his guests. When Isaac took his bride onto the floor for the first waltz Abraham sang loudly against the music of the three-piece band. With a gesture he claimed Ruth for the second dance, while Isaac took his mother onto the floor.
Abraham was everywhere at once that evening. With his wife on his arm he moved among the guests, urging people to eat and drink, not tolerating refusal. Chaim remembered fondly that his stomach had been like lead for a week afterward. He, Chaim, had spent the entire evening trying to avoid his wife, who was better, although she could not yet dance any but the very slow numbers. He had had to avoid her because when Chaim was drunk he got a little foolish – not much; he just giggled a little and grinned about him. When his wife saw him that way she did not scruple to tell him how foolish he was. And on an occasion like this he didn’t want to be told. At a celebration he could be as foolish as anyone else. So he left his wife close to a few other heavy ladies who didn’t dance much, and wandered about, nodding and grinning at people foolishly but contentedly.
Even Sonya Plopler, when she saw that her daughters were having such a good time dancing with Isaac’s friends, that her husband was so happy with too much to drink, and that sh
e herself had so many good things to taste and recipes to collect, forgot to spread the rumor that the bride was older than the groom.
When Abraham got up from the supper table to make a speech he opened his heart and spoke so stirringly that even the woman who had been hired to help with the catering, who understood not a word of Yiddish, wept like a child. Chaim swore to it.
SEVEN
Young people are good for a house. With young ones there is no lack of entertainment. There is a freshness; the walls light up; the whole house seems to come alive. And when the young ones are a young married couple, such as Isaac and Ruth, it is as when a man has a cherry tree in his garden. There had been such a cherry tree in Abraham’s childhood. It was a pity that cherry trees didn’t grow in this climate. But who could complain? Weren’t Ruth and Isaac like a cherry tree that a man could sit and watch in the springtime? The young buds swell and strain and puff themselves out in the sunshine. A man wakes up in the morning, and suddenly the blossoms leap into his eyes, waving their new-released petals so that the whole tree sways with happiness and freedom. So the two of them in their excitement, they too broke forth in his eyes as the cherry tree that blew its blossoms in the sun. And where the blossom is, the fruit will follow. This was a thought to smile over, one of the few that could win a little smile from the lips of his wife. Often he had to remind her of this fact when she was in one of her dark, silent moods. It was a point in favor of life.
Such a little housewife Ruth had become. When Sarah fell ill in the winter, who else would have been able to look after her so capably? He hadn’t reckoned that such a young girl would have such a talent for nursing. Everything had to be done just so. And who else could have prevailed upon Isaac to go see the doctor and ask why his heart beat uncomfortably at times? At least now they had a modern doctor’s explanation for it, although with these doctors it was hard to know one word from another.
“What did the doctor say to you, Isaac?”
“He said that I could live to be ninety.”
“Well, did you thank him for this blessing?”
“But he said that I should try not to overwork or get excited. It makes the heart run – something like that.”
“Nowadays they have to go to the doctor to find this out.”
“He said that if it ever got worse I should come in to see him again.”
“If it gets worse he knows you’ll have to come in to see him again. You went to him so it shouldn’t get worse. What about the colds? Did you ask him why you get the colds?”
“Yes. He said it’s because I get run down, I work too hard, I don’t get enough fresh vegetables to eat, and I’m not enough in the open air. He gave me some pills.”
“Not enough in the open air – well, that’s understandable; that the shop is an unhealthy place is a thing the doctor doesn’t have to tell you. You will have to have a child soon so that you can play with him outside after work. That will give you fresh air. Vegetables? So, it could be. The doctor knows best, after all. If he says vegetables, it must be vegetables. But he would pick vegetables, just because fresh vegetables are hard to get in the winter, and expensive. He couldn’t pick meat – that we get at a discount. Pills – well, that’s more like a doctor. And you work too hard? It needs a doctor to tell us that you work too hard? If it’s not the shop, then it’s the children you teach. When it’s not the children it’s the books. How many things can a man do at once? One would think that you married your wife just so that you would have someone to send to the library. How many times have I myself told Chaim Knopp that you work too hard?”
And now he had the doctor’s own words to prove it. Isaac simply worked too hard. What could one do when one had a son who had to know everything, to read everything? Good books, foolish books, all of them he read. Well, there was something in him, that was all, something that drove him to learning. Who would wish him to stop? Just not so much, that was all. As the doctor said, not too much. Someday, yes, someday people would see what a teacher Isaac would make. Then there would be no more shop. Then they would take him into the Hebrew school and then they would hear; then they would find him worth listening to.
If anything, Ruth was a little bit too fussy, especially about doctors. What could a doctor tell him about his arms that he didn’t know already? To rub them with oil of wintergreen, as the first doctor had told him years ago? When Chaim Knopp asked his son-in-law why a man should get terrible aches in his arms when he lifted something heavy or when he went from a warm room into a refrigerator, Chaim’s son-in-law the doctor had said that the man who got such aches should stop going to the refrigerator from the warm room and should stop lifting heavy things.
Chaim had said, “Well, then, how is a butcher to live if he does not do these things?” And his son-in-law, the elevated doctor, had laughed and told him that he was a doctor, not an economist. This was your doctor. If that was all the help he could give you, then it was wiser to keep your three dollars in your pocket.
Even if she thought too much of the doctors, it still showed that she wanted it for their own good. Another daughter-in-law wouldn’t care, would say, Let them look after themselves. But she – the way she fussed over Sarah and wouldn’t let her do anything, especially now that she wasn’t working any more. Poor Ruth, she was not the first one to lose her job these days. What was there to cry about? They had never had to rely on the earnings of their wives before, and with God’s help they wouldn’t have to now either. There was plenty for her to do in the house. And what a little cook she was. All the new recipes, so that you didn’t know what to expect on your plate any more and could hardly recognize what you found there. Good, yes, undoubtedly. And then Sarah must teach her all the old recipes so that Ruth could make them without Sarah’s having to strain herself. That was a daughter-in-law!
Of course sitting and resting, good though it was for her, was hard for Sarah, who was used to working and cleaning and doing and making. Sometimes she even complained to him a little – well, not really complained; his wife had never been a complainer. But now occasionally there was a moment of something like irritation in her. It was nothing – it passed quickly – a word. “I sit all day and look at my hands,” she had said once after her illness, when she was not allowed to move about much. She did not have to tell him what she thought about when she sat and looked at her hands. The thing to do then was to remind her of the future, of Isaac’s future, of Isaac’s children, who would take the names of their uncles. That was the fine thing about the future. It contained all the unknown good that God had planned, if only a person had the patience and the strength to wait.
“What burden, when burden?” he had said to Ruth when she cried after she lost her job. “You couldn’t be a burden; wait, wait, you will bear the burden yet, eh? The only burden a woman should bear. We don’t talk about burdens. We talk about life!”
Of course he could not say more than this at one time. He was not going to be vulgar, though he could not help wanting to urge a little sometimes. Usually what he wanted done he did for himself. Now it was a matter of waiting for Isaac and Ruth. Isaac was perhaps a little too cautious. A man shouldn’t have to consult his pocketbook before he makes his wife pregnant. Did the wind consult the weather bureau before it picked up the seeds or blew the pollen to the waiting flowers? These things have to happen. It was not just for himself that he was impatient, but for Sarah.
Abraham did not like to think too much of the changes that seemed to have taken place in Sarah. She had not really changed, he told himself. Perhaps she had withered and twisted about a little, as a delicate tree will when its branches have been torn off. And something in her still surged and beat against the dry wounds, seeking its outlet. It was not for him, who understood so well, to find fault when he could find no aid. But that was where a grandchild would help. A woman can’t always look to the future. She needs the present, the immediate satisfactions of life. These things a man wants too, but he looks beyond them. He sees the prese
nt stretching out toward the future. A woman claps her hands and is happy because a child is learning to walk. A man is happy too, but in his mind is the question, In what direction will the child’s steps take him? A man could be compared to the wind, which must riffle through life, turning over the leaves of time with a restlessness, trying to see everything at once, always seeking. A woman waits, rooted in the earth, like a tree, like a flower. Patiently she lifts her face to receive the gift of the wind. Suddenly he sweeps across the earth and stoops to blow the dust. Then she comes to life; she seizes it, clasps it, and works with it the miracle of creation. Now it is his turn to wait. He hovers over her, trying to see, to understand.
What a fine idea! Sometimes the thoughts that grew in his head were a surprise even to himself. “Blessed is God, who has made me a thinking man. Blessed is God for the singing thoughts.” Chaim must hear of this. He would appreciate the philosophy in it. And Isaac. He and Isaac would have a good discussion. Isaac could take the strangest meanings out of a beautiful idea. He was never content to examine merely the beauty of the flower. He had to find its very roots. You could tell him your idea, for instance, about the flower and the wind. And Isaac would say, “Yes, but you seem to put man and woman on different levels, as though the man were somehow the more important of the two, the master. They have different physical functions, it’s true, but nowadays we recognize that women can think just as men do.”
“Isaac, in the first place I didn’t say anything about masters. Have I ever given you any indication that I am one of those old-fashioned Jews who thinks he is his wife’s master? And I didn’t say women can’t think. My wife can think just like anybody else, even though she herself prefers to trust to my judgment. It’s just that, like the flower and the wind, she is different because she is a flower, he is different because he is the wind. She stays home and cooks and cleans and waits for him, and he goes out and seeks a living, and –”
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