Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole

"Such talk makes me sick. Suppose she don't get married, ain't she got a good home and--" "An old maid you want yet! A beau-ti-fool goil like our Poil he wants to make out of her an old maid, or she should break her parents' hearts with a match like Mike Donnely--" "Becky." "Aw, Julius, now we got the chance to rent for three months. Say we live them three months at the Wellington Hotel. Say it costs us a little more; everybody always says what a grand provider you are, Julius; let them say a little more, Julius." "I--I ain't got the money, Becky, I tell you. For me to refuse what you want is like I stick a knife in my heart, but I got poor business, Becky." "Maybe in the end, Julius, it's the cheapest thing we ever done." "I can't afford it, Becky." "For only three months we can go, Julius." "I got notes, Becky, notes already twice extended. If I don't meet in March God knows where--" "Ya, ya, Julius; all that talk I know by heart!" "I ain't getting no younger neither, Becky. Hardly through the insurance examination I could get. I ain't so strong no more. When I get big worries I don't sleep so good. I ain't so well nights, Becky." "Always the imagination sickness, Julius." "I ain't so well, I tell you, Becky." "Last time when all you had was the neuralgia, and you came home from the store like you was dying, Dr. Ellenburg told me hisself right here on this porch that never did he know a man so nervous of dying like you." "I can't help it, Becky." "If I was so afraid like you of dying, Julius, not one meal could I enjoy. A healthy man like you with nothing but the rheumatism and a little asthma. Only last week you came home pale like a ghost with a pain in your side, when it wasn't nothing but where your pipe burnt a hole in your pants pocket to give me some more mending to do." "Just for five minutes you should have felt that pain!" "Honest, Julius, to be a coward like you for dying it ain't nice--honest, it ain't." "Always, Becky, when I think I ain't always going to be with you and the children such a feeling comes over me." "_Ach_, Julius, be quiet! Without you I might just as well be dead, too." "I'm getting old, Becky; sixty-six ain't no spring chicken no more." "That's right, Julius; stick knives in me." "Life is short, Becky; we must be happy while we got each other." "Life _is_ short, Julius, and for our children we should do all what we can. We can't always be with them, Julius. We--we must do the right thing by 'em. Like you say we--we're getting old--together, Julius. We don't want nothing to reproach ourselves with." "Ya, ya, Becky." Darkness fell thickly, like blue velvet portieres swinging together, and stars sprang out in a clear sky. They rocked in silence, their heads touching. The gray cat, with eyes like opals, sprang into the hollow of Mr. Binswanger's arm. "Billy, you come to sit by mamma and me? Ni-ce Bil-ly!" "We go in now, papa; in the damp you get rheumatism." "Ya, ya, Becky--hear how he purrs, like an engine." "Come on, papa; damper every minute it gets." He rose with his rheumatic jerkiness, placed the cat gently on all fours on the floor, and closed his fingers around the curve of his wife's outstretched arm. "When--when we go--go to the city, Becky, we don't sublet Billy; we--we take him with us, not, Becky?" "Yes, papa." "Ya, ya, Becky." * * * * * The chief sponsors for the family hotel are neurasthenia and bridge whist, the inability of the homemaker and the debility of the housekeeper. Under these invasions Hestia turns out the gas-logs, pastes a To Let sign on the windows, locks the front door behind her, and gives the key to the auctioneer. The family holds out the dining-room clock and a pair of silver candlesticks that came over on the stupendously huge cargo which time and curio dealers have piled upon the good ship _Mayflower_; engages a three-room suite on the ninth floor of a European-plan hotel, and inaugurates upon the sly American paradox of housekeeping in non-housekeeping apartments. The Wellington Hotel was a rococo haven for such refugees from the modern social choler, and its doors flew open and offered them a family rate, excellent cuisine, quarantine. Excellent cuisine, however, is a clever but spiceless parody on home cookery. Mr. Binswanger read his evening menu with the furrow deepening between his eyes. "Such a soup they got! Mulla-ga-what?" "'Shh-h-h, papa; mullagatawny! Rice soup." "Mullagatawny! Fine mess!" "'Shh-h-h, Julius; don't talk so loud. Does the whole dining-room got to know you don't know nothing?" Mrs. Binswanger took nervous resume of the red-and-gold, bright-lighted dining-room. "For a plate of noodles soup, Becky, they can have all their mullagatawny! Fifteen cents for a plate of soup, Becky, and at home for that you could make a whole pot full twice so good." "'Sh-h-h-h, papa." "Don't '_sh-h-h-h-h_ me no more neither, Pearlie. Five months, from October to February, I been shooed like I was one of our roosters at home got over in Schlossman's yard. There, you read for me, Izzy; such language I don't know." Isadore took up a card and crinkled one eye in a sly wink toward his mother and sister. "_Rinderbrust und Kartoffel Salad_, pa, _mit Apful Kuechen und Kaletraufschnitt._" "Ya, ya, make fun yet! A square meal like that should happen to me yet in a highway-robbery place like this." Mrs. Binswanger straightened her large-bosomed, stiff-corseted figure in its large-design, black-lace basque, and pulled gently at her daughter's flesh-colored chiffon sleeve, which fell from her shoulders like angels' wings. "Look across the room, Poil. There's Max just coming in the dining-room with his mother. Always the first thing he looks over at our table. Bow, Julius; don't you see across the room the Teitlebaums coming in? I guess old man Teitlebaum is out on the road again." Miss Binswanger flushed the same delicate pink as her chiffon, and showed her oval teeth in a vivid smile. "Ain't he silly, though, to-night, mamma! Look, when he holds up two fingers at me it means first he takes his mother up to her pinochle club, and then by nine o'clock he comes back to me." "How good that woman has got it! Look, Poil, another waist she's wearing again." "Look how he pulls out the chair for his mother, Izzy. It would hurt you to do that for me and mamma, wouldn't it?" "Say, missy, I learnt manners two years before you ever done anything but hold down the front porch out on Newton Avenue. I'd been meetin' Max Teitlebaum and Ignatz Landauer and that crowd over at the Young Men's Association before you'd ever been to the movie with anybody except Meena Schlossman." "I don't see that all your good start got you anywheres." "Don't let swell society go to your head, missy. You ain't got Max yet, neither. You ought to be ashamed to be so crazy about a boy. Wait till I tell you something when we get up-stairs that'll take some of your kink out, missy." "Children, children, hush your fussing! Julius, don't read all the names off the bill of fare." Miss Binswanger regarded her brother under level brows, and threw him a retort that sizzed across the table like drops of water on a hot stove-top. "Anyways, if I was a fellow that couldn't keep a job more than two months at a time I'd lay quiet. I wouldn't be out of a job all the time, and beggin' my father to set me up in business when I was always getting fired from every place I worked." "Children!" "Well, he always starts with me, mamma." "Izzy, ain't you got no respect for your sister? For Gawd's sakes take that bill of fare away from your papa, Izzy. He'll burn a hole in it. Always the prices he reads out loud till so embarrassed I get. No ears and eyes he has for anything else. He reads and reads, but enough he don't eat to keep alive a bird." Mr. Binswanger drew his spectacles off his nose, snapped them into a worn-leather case and into his vest pocket; a wan smile lay on his lips. "I got only eyes for you, Becky, eh? All dressed up, ain't you?--black lace yet! What you think of your mamma, children? Young she gets, not?" "_Ach_, Julius!" The little bout of tenderness sent a smile around the table, and behind the veil of her lashes Miss Binswanger sent the arrow of a glance across the room. "Honest, mamma, I wonder if Max sees anything green on me." "He sees something sweet on you, maybe, Poil. Izzy, pass your papa some radishes. Not a thing does that man eat, and such an appetite he used to have." "Radishes better as these we get in our yard at home. Ten cents for six radishes! Against my appetite it goes to eat 'em, when in my yard at home--" "Home, always home!" "Papa, please don't put your napkin in your collar like a bib. Mamma, make him take it out. Honest, even for the waiter I'm ashamed. How he watches us, too, and laffs behind the tray." "Leave me alone, Pearlie. My shirt-front I don't use for no bib! Laundry rates in this hold-up place ain't so cheap." "Mamma, please make him take it out." "Julius!" "Look, papa, at the Teitlebaums and Schoenfeldts, laughing at us, papa. Look now at him, mamma; just for to spite me he bends over and drinks his soup out loud out of the tip of his spoon--please, papa." Mr. Binswanger jerked his napkin from its mooring beneath each ear and peered across at his daughter with his face as deeply creased as a raisin. "I wish," he said, low in his throat, and with angry emphasis quivering his lips behind the gray and black bristles of his mustache--"ten times a day I wish I was back in my little house in Newton, where I got my comfort and my peace--you children I got to thank for this, you children." Mr. Isadore Binswanger replaced his spoon in his soup-plate and leaned back against his chair. "Aw now, papa, for God's sakes don't begin!" "You good-for-nothing, you! With your hair combed up straight on your head like a girl's, and a pleated shirt like I'd be ashamed to carry in stock, you got no put-in! If I give you five thousand dollars for a business for yourself you don't care so much what kind of manners I got. Five thousand dollars he asks me for to go in business when he ain't got it in him to keep a job for six months." "The last job wasn't--" "Right now in this highway-robbery hotel you got me into, I got to pay your board for you--if you want five thousand dollars from me you got to get rid of me some way, for my insurance policy is all I can say. And sometimes I wish you would--easier for me it would be." "Julius!" His son crumpled his napkin and tossed it toward the center of the table. His soft, moist lips were twisted in anger, and his voice, under cover of a whisper, trembled with that same anger. "For what little board you've paid for me I can't hear about it no more. I'll go out and--" "'Sh-h-h, Izzy--'sh-h-h, papa, all over the dining-room they can hear you, 'sh-h-h!" "Home I ain't never denied my children--open doors they get always in my house but in a highway-robbery hotel, where I can't afford--" "We got the cheapest family rates here. Such rates we get here, children, and highway robbery your father calls it!" "Five months we been in the city, and three months already a empty house standing out there waiting, and nothing from it coming in. A house I love like my life, a house what me and your mamma wish we was back in every minute of the day!" "I only said, Julius, for myself I like my little home best, but--" "I ain't got the strength for the street-car ride no more. I ain't got appetite for this sloppy American food no more. I can't breathe no more