Ruth interrupted her singing and turned around to say something to her mother-in-law. Sarah stood, gripping the side of the table, an attentive, distant smile on her face. What was she thinking about? At first, even though she had been warned by Isaac and knew what there was to know of their former life, Ruth had been a little frightened by the length and intensity of Sarah’s silences. With her face either frighteningly blank or paralyzed in the expression of some emotion, she went about almost mechanically, doing her chores. At such moments only Avrom had the courage to interrupt her. He did this with a gentleness that was to Ruth surprising in a man so forceful in his outward manner as Avrom. If the moment occurred, as it did sometimes, when they were all assembled together, then it seemed to her as though they were suddenly suspended, the three of them, in a thought from which she was excluded. She would look from Abraham and Sarah to Isaac, her husband, and he would be sitting quietly, not looking at anything. If she went up to him and touched him, then he would look at her and smile with something, an oddness, in his look.
Sometimes she was ashamed of herself for wanting to belong even to these moments. Isaac’s face, brightening when he looked at her, was enough to reassure her that she belonged at least to his present and his future. They had proved it to her. That day when she had discovered that she had lost her job, when she had spent the morning going miserably from one dress shop to another, asking for work, and when she had come home to cry all afternoon, hadn’t Isaac scolded her for her foolishness? And Abraham had laughed at her. Why was she apologizing? She no longer had to pay board and room to her brother-in-law. She was needed at home. Hadn’t she been fired because she had taken those three weeks off to stay at home and look after Sarah? Even Sarah had spent the afternoon hovering over her solicitously, comforting her. The feeling of warmth expanded in Ruth. She began to sing again.
Who was singing? Sarah experienced a sense of irritation. Avrom could make as though he liked that voice. But it was shrill, too loud and shrill for her. It pierced through her head. There were no singers nowadays.
It was time, Sarah knew instinctively, although Ruth stood in front of the clock, to set the table. Sarah shook her head. “Avrom won’t eat any of it,” she complained, but her voice was so soft that Ruth did not hear it through her song.
—
At the supper table Isaac told about something that had happened in his shop that day. This Laiah woman, who was quite well known to some of the other workers in the shop, had come in to ask about a job. But she did not want a full-time job, just half-days, in the afternoons. She explained to the foreman that it was boring for her to sit around all day, so she wanted to occupy herself a bit and earn some money at the same time. The foreman had had to turn her down, although, as Beraleh, the shop joker, had said, you could see that it made his glands sweat to have to turn away such a broad pinching territory.
The other workers had had a good laugh over it. How many people came in every day to beg for work to keep themselves and their families alive? And this one wanted work because her afternoons were slack. Not that she cared much when the foreman said no. She said she thought maybe she’d take a little trip if she didn’t get a job. From what they said, she made enough money. According to Beraleh, this husband of hers, who had been in jail for a while, had not returned to her when he was released. Instead he had left the city altogether. They might even be divorced by now, but he was probably paying her money to help support her. There were laws about that sort of thing. Anyway, she didn’t look as though she were starving.
“That one doesn’t starve,” commented Abraham. “She eats with both cheeks. I know; she’s an old customer.”
“Well, she’s luckier than a lot of people. I met Hersh Gottleib the other day. They’ve been on relief for six months already.”
“God preserve us from relief,” said Abraham. “God preserve everyone from relief.”
“He has a lot of preserving to catch up on, then,” was Isaac’s comment.
EIGHT
At last Ruth was pregnant. And it would be a boy; there was no doubt of it. Even before there had been much swelling Sarah had seen, by that species of abdominal phrenology that is traditional among the women, that it was pointed in front, rather than rounded, which surely meant that a son would be born. Abraham, lest Chaim should think that he gloated too much over his good fortune, promised him even more positively than before that he too would have a grandson by his son Ralph. Glowing with his own happy event, he did not find it hard to make the prophecy. And so he was scarcely surprised when, two short months after Ruth had revealed her condition, Chaim bustled into the shop with his news.
“She’s pregnant, my daughter-in-law!” Chaim didn’t seem to realize that it was young Hymie Polsky’s hand that he had seized and was pumping wildly up and down. Hymie’s body jerked loosely to and fro with Chaim’s energetic movement; his mouth was half open in an astonished grin. Chaim let his hand go as suddenly as he had seized it, and rushed forward to embrace Abraham. Hymie, grinning with fatuous delight, watched the old man dance across the sawdust floor, spilling out his news anew to Polsky. In his excitement Chaim tripped over, and then apologized profusely to, the ever pregnant “Poosy.” They all laughed. It was spring, and everyone was pregnant.
“A miracle!” Abraham boomed above the congratulations of Polsky. Of course it was. It was a sign. He had been ready for it – oh, from the moment his own Ruth had announced her condition, some sign, some overabundance to show the hand of God.
“A miracle?” Chaim marveled, scarcely able to believe it.
“Of course, a miracle,” Abraham assured him and was hugely contented, for he felt at home with miracles.
“You think it could be a boy?” Chaim’s grin was anxious.
“What else?” Abraham was not one to skimp his miracles.
Hymie Polsky, whose hand still tingled warmly from Chaim’s handclasp, felt a chill recollection move slowly through his mind. Gradually his mouth gathered itself shut and the astonished grin disappeared from his face. Memory of an old resentment spread itself over his heavy features. Looking around him, Hymie saw that all eyes were on Chaim. With a sudden furtive movement he made an ugly face and an obscene gesture at the old man’s back. “I hope it’s a girl,” he muttered fiercely, but not quite loudly enough for anyone to hear. Then slowly, in spite of the fact that he tried to maintain a sneer, his mouth, of its own will, relaxed open again, and his lips twitched helplessly back into their comfortable grin.
The grandfathers-in-waiting met regularly to compare notes and discuss progress. It was a harrowing experience in some ways, Abraham discovered, this becoming a grandfather for the first time. Truly he did not remember such agitation as this when he was about to become a father. Actually, when he tried to think back on it, he could scarcely remember what he had felt at those times. He had been a father so intensely and so long that the sense of fatherhood had grown into him. But of one thing he was certain. His wife had never during her pregnancies been inclined to get such notions as Ruth. What perfectly healthy woman would want to have her baby in a hospital? When he went with the news to Chaim he received small comfort. The little shoichet was all bitterness and resignation. It was just as he had expected. He had lived through it all before. His own was to be born in a hospital bed as well. Didn’t Abraham know that that was how it was done nowadays? The mothers were fed unclean meat. A crowd of young interns made indecent and unnecessary examinations at will. And of course the mothers were separated from their babies. Who knew for a fact whether they ever returned the right babies to the right mothers? And there were no wise Solomons nowadays to judge.
Abraham was determined to convince Ruth of her folly. She was a spirited girl, right enough, and he was inclined to be proud of her because of this. In a house where he and Isaac often teased each other, she could stand up to them both, never at a loss for words. But to be so willful, and to lead Isaac with her, and their grandson, no.
“It’s ju
st such notions that make for unhealthy births, God forbid,” Abraham remonstrated over the supper table. “I remember a second cousin of my wife’s went mad and became a Christian.” Abraham paused to let them appreciate the full enormity of his statement.
“So?” said Ruth.
“That’s just the point. Who knows if he was a Jew in the first place? Some said the gypsies changed him soon after he was born. That’s why you have to watch these things. Can you watch your baby when the nurses are shuffling them all around?”
“That can’t happen, Pa,” said Isaac. “They mark each baby so they know which is which.”
“Yeh, yeh,” said Abraham. “We had services for him when he became an apostate, just as though he had died. I remember how his mother cried herself to death.” He shook his head several times and murmured audibly, “Oiyoiyoi, children, children” – but throughout the rest of the meal maintained a gloomy silence.
Ruth and Isaac exchanged glances but kept hopefully silent on the subject. Isaac tried to tell an amusing anecdote about something that had happened at work that day, but with little success. Finally Abraham, over his tea, burst out indignantly, “I don’t want them to mark my grandson.”
Isaac tried to explain that the procedure, whatever it was, for identifying the children – and he wasn’t quite sure of what it was himself – was a perfectly harmless one. At any rate, he pointed out, they had several months to go yet. Nothing was really decided. They didn’t even have a bed in the hospital yet. There was no need to argue about it. With these assurances Isaac and Ruth escaped from the house for a little while, to walk and plan in the warm summer evening.
They left Abraham pleased with himself, almost convinced that he had won Isaac over.
“He wasn’t my cousin; he was yours.” His wife’s voice broke softly across his thoughts. He looked up, startled, but her face was averted, her troubled gaze on her hands in front of her.
Abraham felt shame sweeping over him, covering him with self-disgust. It was true.
“Sarah,” he said, taking her hand and turning her to face him. Still she looked down, as though ashamed of what she had let slip.
“Sarah,” he repeated pleadingly. The Christian cousin was a disgrace that had long been a useful member of his store of object lessons. It had been one of the shames of his childhood. He could not remember when he had transferred him to his wife’s side of the family. It just seemed, somehow, when he was telling about it, to slip out that way. She had never complained before, but how it must have hurt her! What had he taken on himself? He was horrified now, thinking of it.
“Forgive me; of course he was mine. My Aunt Tanya’s son. I am a liar,” he said with self-loathing. “God should only punish me.”
“No,” she said. She let him pull her toward him and lean his face in her hair. Her hair, he noticed, was whiter than the gray streaks in his beard.
“Sarah,” he mumbled into her hair, “what will I do without you? What will I do without you?” He realized while he spoke the implication of what he was saying, and gripped her tighter in the terror of a sudden spasm of foreknowledge. She was silent in his arms, as though already distant. What will I do without you? He closed his eyes tightly and choked back the words.
—
Ruth allowed herself to relax more heavily on Isaac’s arm. She felt him brace himself slightly to hold her weight and felt, rather than saw, the pleased smile that lit his face as he did so.
“You want to turn back?” he asked.
“No, not yet.” Neither did he, she knew. The thought amused her a little. There was really much of his father in him. Or did she only imagine that since her condition had become more obvious he smiled more frequently at the people they passed?
She sighed. Isaac bent over her anxiously. She heard herself saying, “All of a sudden I have a longing for an ice-cream cone.” While she waited for him to fetch it she wondered why she had said that. She had not been aware of any longing for an ice-cream cone until he had bent over her so anxiously. They expected her to want things. Sometimes – was it to satisfy them or herself? – she play-acted a little. She could remember a time when she had wanted things desperately, many things. Once, for instance, she had wanted boy friends, and she had fought for them. When she had won, that had seemed to prove something to herself, and when she had lost, that had also proved something. What? Those times seemed so vague and distant now that she could not at the moment remember any specific occasion. She could really be aware now, for any length of time, only of the sureness inside of herself, of the ease with which she could reach out for the ice-cream cone, surprised that it was just what she had wanted after all.
“At least he didn’t harp on the atheist business this time,” said Isaac. Never, he told himself, would he be able to follow his father’s reasoning processes. There was no one, of this he was convinced, not anyone in the whole world who could start with two totally unrelated points and end by welding them as securely together as his father could.
Suddenly, the other night, when they had been sitting out on the front porch, out of a clear blue sky – an evening sky in which even the stars seemed suddenly to blink in a startled way – Abraham made a hopeless gesture, turned his eyes to the sky, and declaimed loudly, “O God O God O God, that my only remaining son should become an atheist!”
“What’s brought that into your head?” asked Isaac hastily.
“A father can tell.” Abraham sighed. “A father’s heart feels.”
“What can you feel?” protested Isaac.
“What can you feel,” countered Abraham, “when you go to work on Saturdays?”
“But I’ve told you before, Pa, in this country you can’t keep a job in my trade unless you work on Saturdays. The bosses are no longer very sensitive to the feelings of religious immigrants. Either you work when they tell you or there are plenty of others who are only too willing to work on Saturdays, if they could only find the work.”
Abraham smiled with a certain ironic satisfaction. “And I suppose,” he said with elaborate sarcasm, “that in this country the women can’t have babies any more outside of hospitals either?”
Having made his point, Abraham allowed the silence to lengthen while Isaac found himself blinking back at the stars. In a way, though, he was relieved that his father’s argument had taken this turn….
“I wonder,” Isaac mused out loud, “whether they had funerals for those who became atheists as well.”
Ruth felt a movement within her that seemed to indicate perfect satisfaction with the ice cream. “Funerals?” she said vaguely.
When they got back to the house Abraham still waited up for them in the kitchen. He stood up to face them grimly, cutting through Ruth’s greeting with a gesture of his hand. Ruth and Isaac exchanged dismayed glances.
“It was my cousin, the apostate, not your mother’s,” he stated firmly. “You should know.” After waiting for a moment to give them a chance to reply, he nodded seriously and bade them a dignified good night.
—
Abraham continued to agitate against a hospital birth. Time and again both Ruth and Isaac countered his arguments by enumerating the advantages of the hospital. As was his way, the more he felt himself being gradually convinced that they might perhaps be right, the further afield he went in his attempts to prove them wrong. But inwardly he was already pulling in his last defenses. The baby was the important thing. One could outwit the doctors. He himself would go to the hospital. He would be there from the moment the child was born. He would not let it out of his sight. Wherever they took it, he would follow. If Ruth thought that she would have better care in the hospital, then far be it for him to deny her. But he would be there, alert, watching.
When the time came it was Abraham who urged Ruth, somewhat incoherently, to hold on until they could reach the hospital.
“We will call him Moishe Jacob,” Abraham stated to the anteroom at large when they heard the news, “for my eldest sons who were killed in t
he pogrom. You see,” he explained to the others who waited, most of whom did not understand him but smiled with a sort of nervous sympathy, “new grapes on the vines.” He laughed and spread out his arms. “Who can be my equal now?”
When the nurse brought the child out to them Abraham led Sarah forward so that, after Isaac, she should be the first to hold him. Holding the child, she wept bitterly, partly for joy and partly because she had a fear of church bells and always when there was a movement toward happiness inside of her she thought she heard a carillon ringing.
—
Chaim performed the operation. A few friends of the family – the Polskys, Mrs. Plopler, Ruth’s relatives, and one or two young couples who were acquaintances of Ruth and Isaac – came to the hospital for the ceremony. Chaim, his eyes bright with awareness of the dignity of his office, did not mingle with the guests before the operation but stood, slightly aloof, behind the little table that had been prepared for him. His little beard, freshly manicured, nodded politely now and again as he caught the eye of one or another of the guests. He draped the long white satin talus over his shoulders.
The nurse brought the child in and laid it in Sarah’s arms. Sarah lifted it up to Abraham. Abraham strode with it to where Ruth’s brother-in-law waited. Mrs. Plopler’s nose moved rapidly in expressive disapproval. She had expected her husband to be given the honor of taking the child from Abraham. In fact, she had turned up at the house the day after the child was born and in a remarkable duet with herself had contrived to invite her husband, express agreeable surprise, and accept the invitation, all before she was well within the door. There had been a few difficult moments spent in trying to appease her when she discovered that the honor had already been promised to Ruth’s brother-in-law. Even now Mrs. Plopler wasn’t sure whether the insult wasn’t big enough to warrant her staying away from the affair altogether. But she had not been able to bring herself to stay away. Her husband, however – he, certainly, had refused to come. Mrs. Plopler felt a disagreeable sensation inside of her now as she recalled that she herself had invited her husband, in Abraham’s name, to help in the ceremony. And then when she had come home to him with the news that he would not be able to take part! Mrs. Plopler closed her eyes for a moment, and her nose positively shuddered.
The Sacrifice Page 14