Hungry Hearts
you before I left for my vacation, but the words wouldn't come. Since
I have been away I have written you many letters, but I did not
mail them, for they were like my old self from which I want to break
away."
He put his cool, strong hand into mine. "You can save me," he
said. "You can free me from the bondage of age-long repressions. You
can lift me out of the dead grooves of sterile intellectuality. Without
you I am the dry dust of hopes unrealized. You are fire and sunshine
and desire. You make life changeable and beautiful and full of daily
wonder."
I couldn't speak. I was so on fire with his words. Then, like
whirlwinds in my brain, rushed out the burning words of the matchmaker:
"Not young, not lively, and without money, too!"
"You are younger than youth," he said, kissing my hands. "Every
day of your unlived youth shall be relived with love, but such a love
as youth could never know."
And then how it happened I don't know; but his arms were around
me. "Sara Reisel, tell me, do you love me," he said, kissing me on
my hair and on my eyes and on my lips.
I could only weep and tremble with joy at his touch. "The miracle!"
cried my heart; "the miracle of America come true!"
WHERE LOVERS DREAM
For years I was saying to myself--Just so you will act when you meet
him. Just so you will stand. So will you look on him. These words you
will say to him.
I wanted to show him that what he had done to me could not down me;
that his leaving me the way he left me, that his breaking my heart
the way he broke it, didn't crush me; that his grand life and my
pinched-in life, his having learning and my not having learning--that
the difference didn't count so much like it seemed; that on the
bottom I was the same like him.
But he came upon me so sudden, all my plannings for years smashed to
the wall. The sight of him was like an earthquake shaking me to pieces.
I can't yet see nothing in front of me and can't get my head
together to anything, so torn up I am from the shock.
It was at Yetta Solomon's wedding I met him again. She was after me
for weeks I should only come.
"How can I come to such a swell hall?" I told her. "You know I
ain't got nothing decent to wear."
"Like you are without no dressing-up, I want you to come. You are the
kind what people look in your eyes and not on what you got on. Ain't
you yourself the one what helped me with my love troubles? And now,
when everything is turning out happy, you mean to tell me that you
ain't going to be there?"
She gave me a grab over and kissed me in a way that I couldn't say
"No" to her.
So I shined myself up in the best I had and went to the wedding.
I was in the middle from giving my congratulations to Yetta and her new
husband, when--Gott! Gott im Himmel! The sky is falling to the earth! I
see him--him, and his wife leaning on his arm, coming over.
I gave a fall back, like something sharp hit me. My head got dizzy, and
my eyes got blind.
I wanted to run away from him, but, ach! everything in me rushed to
him.
I was feeling like struck deaf, dumb, and blind all in one.
He must have said something to me, and I must have answered back
something to him, but how? What? I only remember like in a dream my
getting to the cloakroom. Such a tearing, grinding pain was dragging me
down to the floor that I had to hold on to the wall not to fall.
All of a sudden I feel a pull on my arm. It was the janitor with the
broom in his hand.
"Lady, are you sick? The wedding people is all gone, and I swept up
already."
But I couldn't wake up from myself.
"Lady, the lights is going out," he says, looking on me queer.
"I think I ain't well," I said. And I went out.
* * * * *
Ach, I see again the time when we was lovers! How beautiful the world
was then!
"Maybe there never was such love like ours, and never will be," we
was always telling one another.
When we was together there was like a light shining around us, the
light from his heart on mine, and from my heart on his. People began to
look happy just looking on us.
When we was walking we didn't feel we was touching the earth but
flying high up through the air. We looked on the rest of the people
with pity, because it was seeming to us that we was the only two
persons awake, and all the rest was hurrying and pushing and slaving
and crowding one on the other without the splendidness of feeling for
what it was all for, like we was feeling it.
David was learning for a doctor. Daytimes he went to college,
and nights he was in a drug-store. I was working in a factory on
shirt-waists. We was poor. But we didn't feel poor. The waists I was
sewing flyed like white birds through my fingers, because his face was
shining out of everything I touched.
David was always trying to learn me how to make myself over for
an American. Sometimes he would spend out fifteen cents to buy me
the "Ladies' Home Journal" to read about American life, and my
whole head was put away on how to look neat and be up-to-date like the
American girls. Till long hours in the night I used to stay up brushing
and pressing my plain blue suit with the white collar what David liked,
and washing my waists, and fixing up my hat like the pattern magazines
show you.
On holidays he took me out for a dinner by a restaurant, to learn me
how the Americans eat, with napkins, and use up so many plates--the
butter by itself, and the bread by itself, and the meat by itself, and
the potatoes by itself.
Always when the six o'clock whistle blowed, he was waiting for me on
the corner from the shop to take me home.
"Ut, there waits Sara's doctor feller," the girls were nudging
one to the other, as we went out from the shop. "Ain't she the
lucky one!"
All the way as we walked along he was learning me how to throw off my
greenhorn talk, and say out the words in the American.
He used to stop me in the middle of the pavement and laugh from me,
shaking me: "No t'ink or t'ank or t'ought, now. You're an
American," he would say to me. And then he would fix my tongue
and teeth together and make me say after him: "th-think, th-thank,
th-thought; this, that, there." And if I said the words right, he
kissed me in the hall when we got home. And if I said them wrong, he
kissed me anyhow.
He moved next door to us, so we shouldn't lose the sweetness from one
little minute that we could be together. There was only the thin wall
between our kitchen and his room, and the first thing in the morning,
we would knock in one to the other to begin the day together.
"See what I got for you, Hertzele," he said to me one day, holding
up a grand printed card.
I gave a read. It was the ticket invitation for his graduation from
college. I gave it a touch, with pride melting over in my heart.
"Only one week more, and you'll be a doctor for the world!"
"And then, heart of mine," he said, drawing me over to him and
kissing me on the lips, "when I get my office fixed up, you will
marry me?"
"Ach, such a happiness," I answered, "to be together all the
time, and wait on you and cook for you, and do everything for you, like
if I was your mother!"
"Uncle Rosenberg is coming special from Boston for my graduation."
"The one what helped out your chance for college?" I asked.
"Yes, and he's going to start me up the doctor's office, he
says. Like his son he looks on me, because he only got daughters in his
family."
"Ach, the good heart! He'll yet have joy and good luck from
us! What is he saying about me?" I ask.
"I want him to see you first, darling. You can't help going to his
heart, when he'll only give a look on you."
"Think only, Mammele--David is graduating for a doctor in a week!"
I gave a hurry in to my mother that night. "And his Uncle Rosenberg
is coming special from Boston and says he'll start him up in his
doctor's office."
"Oi weh, the uncle is going to give a come, you say? Look how the
house looks! And the children in rags and no shoes on their feet!"
The whole week before the uncle came, my mother and I was busy nights
buying and fixing up, and painting the chairs, and nailing together
solid the table, and hanging up calendar pictures to cover up the
broken plaster on the wall, and fixing the springs from the sleeping
lounge so it didn't sink in, and scrubbing up everything, and even
washing the windows, like before Passover.
I stopped away from the shop, on the day David was graduating.
Everything in the house was like for a holiday. The children
shined up like rich people's children, with their faces
washed clean and their hair brushed and new shoes on their feet. I made
my father put away his black shirt and dress up in an American white
shirt and starched collar. I fixed out my mother in a new white waist
and a blue checked apron, and I blowed myself to dress up the baby
in everything new, like a doll in a window. Her round, laughing face
lighted up the house, so beautiful she was.
By the time we got finished the rush to fix ourselves out, the
children's cheeks was red with excitement and our eyes was bulging
bright, like ready to start for a picnic.
When David came in with his uncle, my father and mother and all the
children gave a stand up.
But the "Boruch Chabo" and the hot words of welcome, what was
rushing from us to say, froze up on our lips by the stiff look the
uncle throwed on us.
David's uncle didn't look like David. He had a thick neck and a red
face and the breathing of a man what eats plenty.--But his eyes looked
smart like David's.
He wouldn't take no seat and didn't seem to want to let go from
the door.
David laughed and talked fast, and moved around nervous, trying to
cover up the ice. But he didn't get no answers from nobody. And he
didn't look in my eyes, and I was feeling myself ashamed, like I did
something wrong which I didn't understand.
My father started up to say something to the uncle--"Our David--"
But I quick pulled him by the sleeve to stop. And nobody after that
could say nothing, nobody except David.
I couldn't get up the heart to ask them to give a taste from the cake
and the wine what we made ready special for them on the table.
The baby started crying for a cake, and I quick went over to take her
up, because I wanted to hide myself with being busy with her. But only
the crying and nothing else happening made my heart give a shiver, like
bad luck was in the air.
And right away the uncle and him said good-bye and walked out.
When the door was shut the children gave a rush for the cakes, and then
burst out in the street.
"Come, Schmuel," said my mother, "I got to say something with
you." And she gave my father a pull in the other room and closed
the door.
I felt they was trying not to look on me, and was shrinking away from
the shame that was throwed on me.
"Och, what's the matter with me! Nothing can come between David and
me. His uncle ain't everything," I said, trying to pull up my head.
I sat myself down by the table to cool down my nervousness. "Brace
yourself up," I said to myself, jumping up from the chair and
beginning to walk around again. "Nothing has happened. Stop off
nagging yourself."
Just then I hear loud voices through the wall. I go nearer. Ut, it's
his uncle!
The plaster from the wall was broken on our side by the door. "Lay
your ear in this crack, and you can hear plain the words," I say to
myself.
"What's getting over you? You ain't that kind to do such a
thing," I say. But still I do it.
Oi weh, I hear the uncle plainly! "What's all this mean, these
neighbors? Who's the pretty girl what made such eyes on you?"
"Ain't she beautiful? Do you like her?" I hear David.
"What? What's that matter to you?"
"I'll marry myself to her," says David.