“You must be frozen,” said Laiah. “I’m absolutely chilled from holding your coat.” Laiah caught Jenny’s eye. That one was getting a real thrill. In her most gracious English manner Laiah introduced her guests to each other.
“You look tired,” said Jenny daringly.
“Yes,” said Abraham. He felt his tiredness and was grateful for the chair and the warmth.
Jenny looked at Laiah delightedly. “It’s a long way up.” She addressed Abraham. “Fifty-eight steps. I’ve counted them. That’s not counting the front steps. They make it sixty-three.” Jenny blushed.
Laiah explained that Jenny was her neighbor and that they had become very good friends, and while Jenny was recovering from her blushes Laiah moved on to other subjects. With a certain delicacy, partly because she was not sure exactly what to say about such a subject, Laiah ignored Abraham’s recent bereavement. Still her questions worked around the subject. Abraham answered briefly questions about Ruth and the child. Again she asked him how he came to be doing deliveries and Abraham explained.
“A Polsky good turn,” said Laiah. She started to tell, in English, of the Polskys and their business. She spoke in a lively and acid manner which titillated her friend Jenny into an endless fit of giggles.
There was something unreal to Abraham, and yet at the same time very real and simple, about the fact that he was sitting here now – These people are alive too. He turned the thought over, trying to find its hidden significance.
Laiah’s anecdotes about the Polskys grew more pointed and even less complimentary as she continued. Abraham’s mind wandered as the English phrases skipped by. Suddenly he remembered his own thought about her that had come to him on the stairs. Vexed with himself that he should have indulged such thoughts at her expense and now sat accepting bits of her buttered coffee cake and drinking her tea, he grunted out loud and made a gesture of annoyance.
Laiah stopped talking abruptly. “I’ve bored you,” she said. “Men don’t like women’s gossip. It’s your fault, Jenny. You let me go on and on.”
“No,” said Abraham. “It was something else.”
“You don’t like, maybe, the way I talk about – Never mind.” Laiah sighed. “Someday perhaps I’ll tell you. It’s funny how” – Laiah leaned forward and looked sympathetically into his face – “you’re the kind of person one can talk to. I’ve felt it before. There are some people who aren’t like others.” Laiah made a vague, general gesture, noticed Jenny’s eyes quizzically on her, and said in English, “Cups.” After quickly draining her own, she handed it to Jenny.
Abraham glanced through the doorway to where his coat was hung. It was time for him to go. But his eye was caught now by Jenny’s ritual movements with the cup and Laiah’s air of vivacious interest.
Jenny, after a moment of serious study, which involved much movement of the head and widening and narrowing of the eyes, fluttered her fingers to her chest and glanced coyly at Abraham. “I see a man,” she said.
“So do I,” said Laiah a little sternly, trying to hint with a glance that Jenny was not to take too much liberty along that line right now.
Abraham remembered the gypsies of his childhood. Was that what it was? They were making passes into the unknown.
“He’s – well, a very distinguished-looking man,” Jenny pressed on, ignoring Laiah’s hint. “And he’ll come to see you.” Her imagination soared. “It looks as if he might” – Jenny interrupted herself to giggle – “there might even be a long trip. And you seem to be – tied to him, somehow.”
“Foolishness.” Laiah, who tended to believe her cups implicitly, laughed. “I occasionally have a friend visit me, but it’s been a long time since anyone took me on a trip.” The truth of this statement struck her as she spoke, and she continued a little irritably. “Stop making it up and read from the cup.”
“But I am reading from the cup.” Jenny’s voice rose to falsetto, injured. “Look.”
“Well, what are those leaves over there?”
Jenny began to giggle nervously again. “Well, I’m not sure; that’s why I say you’re attached. But I think they might mean – well, they look like – That means marriage, of course,” Jenny ended hastily and, blushing, couldn’t raise her eyes even sideways to glance at Abraham.
Laiah smiled at Abraham. “That’s enough for me now,” she said. “Shall she read your glass, Avrom? Of course she only knows how to read cups, not glasses, but I’m sure if we ask her nicely she’d be willing to try.”
“My glass?” said Abraham.
“Your future,” Laiah went on in Yiddish. “She’ll look into your tea glass and tell you your future.”
“I can’t guarantee that I’m always right,” said Jenny eagerly, “but people are always coming back to me and asking me how I knew it would happen.”
“Jenny’s practically a professional,” said Laiah. She reached for Abraham’s glass.
“No!” said Abraham with sudden violence. “More future? God will tell.” He looked with a sort of horror into his glass and quickly turned it over in his saucer so that the remaining tea and bits of leaves ran out. At the same time he got up from his place.
“What did he say?” asked Jenny, a little frightened. Laiah didn’t answer. “What did he say?” Jenny repeated.
“He said that only God can tell him his future,” Laiah snapped.
Jenny was a little disturbed. Alone in the kitchen as Laiah helped Abraham on with his coat, she surreptitiously upturned his tea glass. He had made a mess of it, shaking it so. What did he mean by bringing God into it? There was something sinister about it all.
“We hardly got a chance to talk,” said Laiah. “Well, another time. There’s always a glass of tea. Now that he’s got you harnessed to the delivery bag you’ll need it occasionally. I don’t usually like to order things because it’s so much trouble delivering them, but they aggravate me so much sometimes that I don’t even like going in there.”
After she had let Abraham out Laiah leaned against the door for a moment and listened to his footsteps receding down the stairs. Funny. Who could tell what he thought? Behind her she heard Jenny moving about in the kitchen. Her smile curled itself downward on her face. She went back into the kitchen and picked up a dishtowel. “Next time,” she mused out loud, “I’ll give him the bread knife to sharpen.”
“Who?” said Jenny.
“Him – who else?” said Laiah irritably.
“I thought you said he was a butcher,” came Jenny’s voice, insistent and vaguely suspicious.
“So?”
“Now you say he sharpens knives.” Jenny was keen.
Laiah sighed patiently. “He has a whetstone in the shop. They have to keep their knives sharp.”
“He doesn’t look like just a butcher, somehow. You know, I really like a beard on a man, even though it is old-fashioned.”
Laiah didn’t answer. She was thinking irritatedly that she didn’t care what Jenny liked on a man. How did she know what there was to like on a man?
“Will they send an order to someone they don’t know? I mean a new customer?” Jenny asked.
“Why not?”
“Maybe I’ll make an order one of these days. I seem to like this kosher meat, though it’s so expensive,” said Jenny.
“If you like I’ll have him send up what you want when I order again,” Laiah offered politely.
“Oh,” said Jenny a little archly, “I can phone myself.”
Laiah looked at her for a moment. Then she gave a low chuckle. “He’s really made an impression on you, eh, my bearded Avrom?” She put just enough malice into her words to scorch Jenny’s cheeks.
“Whatever are you talking about?” Jenny shrilled, her face red and offended.
“I’m only joking.” Laiah smiled placatingly, though not with enthusiasm. “I really mean that it would save Avrom the trouble of having to climb the stairs twice if we made our order together.”
“Well, if you’re so anxious you can have S
anta Claus all to yourself,” snapped Jenny. “I wouldn’t think of tiring your poor old man.”
“Look how she’s blushing! I believe you, I believe you. Can’t I tease you a little bit? You know you’re not so innocent as you pretend. And besides, between you and me, he’s not so poor and not so old as all that, is he? He has had a great tragedy happen in his family lately. Sometime I’ll tell you all about it. You haven’t even done my nails yet.”
Jenny let herself be reconciled. All the same, as she sat expertly buffing Laiah’s fingernails she alternately rankled and preened inside herself, remembering bits and pieces of their little tiff. She was certainly quick to warn you off her territory, this one. That she should even think! Well, it showed what some people had in mind. But she had told her, all right. Some people assumed that because you were nice to them you were like them. Wasn’t there a certain note of jealousy in what she had said, the way she had sprung in with it? Well, perhaps she, Jenny, could do some teasing herself.
Laiah caught the changing expressions on the face of the one whom, for the sake of the gang of schleppers at Polsky’s, she had expanded into a “whole new crowd, some of them gentile.” Let them know that the kibitzarnia was by her not such a necessary thing.
“Maybe” – Jenny looked up suddenly with a roguish smile on her prim, rather vacant face, which made her eyes glare out suddenly. “Maybe” – she went off into one of her long giggles – “I will order meat from your friend Avrom after all.”
Laiah, who had had to change the expression on her face very quickly, smiled in an accentuated way. “You do that,” she said.
Jenny went off into another trill of laughter. “Aren’t you finished yet?” Laiah interrupted her restlessly. “You’re taking a long time today.”
Jenny smirked and went back to work. Laiah sucked her under lip. Tired, she told herself, of you and your silly face. But she kept her hands very still. Gradually, her mind drifted into a voluptuous consideration of the promises of the tea leaves.
—
Once he was out in the open, Abraham could scarcely believe it had happened. Of course they were not serious. It was some game they played. His future. What kind of witchcraft was this? What could she know about his future? Almost from the first moment when they had, as though by command, come to this city, this Laiah had been there, moving always in a direction that was exactly opposite to his path in life. And now she spoke casually of his future, as though at her bidding her friend could look into his glass of tea and reveal to him God’s secret intentions – as though the Almighty would choose to reveal His secrets in such a manner. And who were these women, that they should play so triflingly with such things when he had offered up his whole life and had it struck away from him? Here, Abraham, is your life. Trace it out in the dregs of your empty glass. See, here’s my cup. It’s empty too. Laiah’s lips twisted themselves into a smile in front of his face. He rubbed the back of his mitt across his face and shook his head. What kind of foolishness!
She had not paid him. Abraham stood still. What would Hymie say about it tomorrow morning when he turned in the money? For a few moments he worried about it. “Never mind,” he burst out suddenly, half shouting aloud with vexation. “I’ll tell him to collect it himself.” Startled at the sound of his own voice, he looked about him. But the street was dark and empty of people. Only the yellow lights in the windows glowed with an inward warmth up and down the street, making him long for the child, for Ruth, a longing that drove him more quickly forward, that distracted him because it would not stay within the bounds of the possible, would not stop with Ruth and the child.
—
It seemed like a long time ago, in another life altogether – when he had been a baby, was the way Moses put it to himself – that his grandfather used to tell him stories about all the wonders that had happened in the world. Those wonders, like his grandfather’s booming laugh, were things that did not happen so often now, since his father had died and he had become an orphan and grown up. He knew other things now that he hadn’t known then, especially all about Hell and the Devil. They belonged mostly to Donald Gregory and the other goyim, but Donald Gregory said they were all over too. Time and again he had wanted to ask his grandfather about Hell and the Devil – if they were really true, and why his grandfather had never told him about them. But he was afraid to ask. If Grampa said that they really were true, then he knew he would have to be punished. They would come after him and they would throw him into the fire, and he would not be able to come running out as his father had, carrying the Torah, because the Devil would hold him down for his sins, and he would burn all over.
He was afraid of his father’s ghost, that was why. Not always; sometimes, in daylight when he was with other people, he would silently beg his father’s forgiveness because he had been afraid last night that his father would haunt him. Donald Gregory knew all about haunting. His church had a Holy Ghost. But Moses didn’t want to be haunted. How would his father feel, up there, if he knew that his own son wished and prayed never to hear from him again? He would think that he didn’t love him. And that wasn’t true. It was just the dark he was afraid of, and suddenly hearing and feeling someone in the room with him that he couldn’t touch. How did he even know it would be his father? They might change him and send down someone else instead, pretending to be his father, for some dreadful purpose. Sometimes, when he was alone in the house, without even wanting to, he would think about it, and he would become so frightened that he couldn’t move his head or even his eyes, because a presence was there, somewhere.
Every day on the way home from Chaider, where he went straight from school, he prayed earnestly, as hard as he could pray, that either his mother or his grandfather should be home already so that he wouldn’t have to try the door and find it locked, and so when they came home and found him waiting outside they shouldn’t ask him why he hadn’t opened it with his own key and gone into the house. That key. When his mother had given it to him and told him what a big boy he was now and that she trusted him enough to give him a key to the house, warning him that he must never lose it or give it to anybody, he had felt like a grown-up somebody. He carried it tied to a string around his neck, inside his shirt. When he had shown it to the other boys who ate lunch at school they had all crowded around him. Tony’s mother worked too, but he never got a key to the house. After four he went to Dmitri’s till his mother came home, because his mother was afraid that one of the customers might come into the house and drink the booze without paying for it, and Tony would be too small to stop him. Moses was certain that if there were booze in their house his mother would still give him the key, because he could make anybody pay. But of course they weren’t bootleggers.
Only what good was it to have the key when he was afraid to go into the house by himself, afraid to sit in the kitchen because then he might start thinking and listening for sounds in the house? Usually God was on his side, and by the time he came home from Yiddish school his mother was already home. And when she wasn’t he played in the yard by himself or with the cats, telling himself that he’d go in when he wanted to, waiting for her, and praying for his father to forgive him at the same time, so that his feelings were all mixed up in him and he played his game fiercely, trying to forget who and what he was.
When she was late, when Madame Claire had kept her, Ruth liked most the moment when she recognized the child coming toward her through the snow. He had waited for her. And though she would scold him for it because he was cold and wet from playing so long in the snow, she was glad. Together, while she asked him questions about his day, they turned in at the gate. Then she took out her key, or if her arms were full of parcels she asked him to unlock the door. But he usually gave her the key and held some of the parcels while she opened the door. And she liked this childlike gesture too.
Perhaps it had been too much to expect, she sometimes told herself, to be perfectly happy. It was no use even to think about that. She still had this much, the c
hild waiting for her, their supper to get, a hundred other needs to fill. So much at least he had left her. The supper that she had prepared last night was warm and ready long before Abraham opened the door.
FOURTEEN
After the argument they sat there at the kitchen table, surprised and a little ashamed, for during the quarreling each one had gradually managed to make clear to the other, in spite of the raised voices and the injured tones, that at the bottom of it all was a misunderstanding.
Abraham turned at last to the boy, who had sat still, the tears drying on his cheeks, looking from one to the other all this time. “Why didn’t you tell me that your mother had already said no?”
The boy fidgeted with his hands. He was still shocked that they had shouted so, even for a few moments. There had been quarrels before in the house. But there was something about the way they used to argue long ago, when his father was alive, that had been different. There had not been the feeling then, hanging in the air, that they were somehow implacably, hatefully, opposed to each other, that each was somehow sure that the other was trying to do him vital harm. He hadn’t meant any harm.
“I thought that if you said yes, Ma would let me go,” he said lamely. But what of the funny excitement he had felt, as well as the fear, when they had started to quarrel? “I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!” He began to cry again.
“Never mind,” said his mother. “Never mind, it’s all right. Go and practice now. Maybe tomorrow if you’re good you can stay out longer.”
The boy accepted his dismissal, but he still hesitated, wanting to tell them that he was sorry, that it was his fault, but that all he had wanted was – “Go, go,” said his grand-father gently, “make a little music.”
“I’m sorry, Pa,” said Ruth when the boy had left the room. “I didn’t mean to jump down your throat that way. I’m so nervous lately.”
“It’s nothing,” said Abraham. It was nothing, a mistake. As if he would do a thing like that. How was he to know that the child had already asked her? But was that any reason for her to jump on him that way, to tell him that she did not want him to interfere with her upbringing of her own child? And in front of the boy, too. What was he, then, a stranger, that he must not say anything to his own grandson without her permission? He was Isaac’s child too, his child. And how could she think that he would deliberately do anything to spite her? Was that how little they knew each other? He looked over to where she sat across the table from him, her elbow on the table and her head against her hand. A few moments ago they had been like two strangers facing each other, antagonistic, misunderstanding.
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