Just Around the Corner: Romance en casserole
in that coop up-stairs. Right now you should know how my feet hurt for
slippers; a collar I got to wear to supper when like a knife it cuts me.
I can't afford this. I got such troubles with business I only wish for
one day you should have 'em. I want my little house, my porch, my vines,
and my chickens. I want my comforts. My son ain't my boss."
Isadore pushed back from the table, his jaw low and sullen.
"I ain't going to sit through a meal and be abused like--like I was a--"
"You ain't got to sit; stand up, then."
"Izzy--for God's sakes, Izzy, the people! Julius, so help me if I come
down to a meal with you again. Look, Julius, for God's sake--the
Teitlebaums are watching us--the people! Smile at me, Poil, like we was
joking. Izzy, if you leave this table now I--I can't stand it! Laugh,
Poil, like we was having our little fun among us."
The women exchanged the ghastly simulacrum of a smile, and the meal
resumed in silence. Only small beads sprang out on the shiny surface of
Mr. Binswanger's head like dewdrops on the glossy surface of leaves, and
twice his fork slipped and clattered from his hand.
"So excited you get right away, Julius. Nervous as a cat you are."
"I--I ain't got the strength no more, Becky. Pink sleeping-tablets I got
to take yet to make me sleep. I ain't got the strength."
"'Shh-h-h, Julius; don't get excited. In the spring we go home. You
don't want, Julius, to spoil everything right this minute. Ain't it
enough the way our Poil has come out in these five months? Such a grand
time that goil has had this winter. Do you want that the Teitlebaums
should know all our business and spoil things?"
"I--I wish sometimes that name I had never heard in my life. In my days
a young girl--"
"'Shh-h-h, Julius; we won't talk about it now--we change the subject."
"I--"
"Look over there, will you, Poil? Always extras the Teitlebaums have on
their table. Paprica, and what is that red stuff? Chili sauce! Such
service we don't get. Pink carnations on their table, too. To-morrow at
the desk I complain. Our money is just as good as theirs."
Miss Binswanger raised her harried eyes from her plate and smiled at her
mother; she was like a dark red rose, trembling, titillating, and with
dewy eyes.
"Don't stare so, mamma."
"Izzy, are you going to stay home to-night? One night it won't hurt you.
Like you run around nights to dance-halls ain't nothing to be proud of."
"Now start something, mamma, so pa can jump on me again. If Pearlie and
Max are going to use the front room this evening, what shall I do? Sit
in a corner till he's gone and I can go to bed?"
"I should care if he goes to dance-halls or not. What I say, Becky,
don't make no difference to my son. Take how I begged him to hold on his
job!"
"If you're done your dessert wait till we get up-stairs, papa. The
dining-room knows already enough of our business."
Miss Binswanger pushed back from the table to her feet. Tears rose in a
sheer film across her eyes, but she smiled with her lips and led the
procession of her family from the gabbling dining-room, her small, dark
head held upward by the check-rein of scorched pride and the corner of
her tear-dimmed glance for the remote table with the centerpiece of
pink carnations.
By what seemed demoniac aforethought the Binswanger three-room suite was
rigidly impervious to sunlight, air, and daylight. Its infinitesimal
sitting-room, which the jerking backward of a couch-cover transformed
into Mr. Isadore Binswanger's bedchamber, afforded a one-window view of
a long, narrow shaft which rose ten stories from a square of asphalt
courtyard, up from which the heterogeneous fumes of cookery wafted like
smoke through a legitimate flue.
Mr. Binswanger dropped into a veteran arm-chair that had long since
finished duty in the deluxe suite, and breathed onward through a beard
as close-napped as Spanish moss.
He was suddenly old and as withered as an aspen leaf trembling on its
rotten stem. Vermiculate cords of veins ran through the flesh like the
chirography of pain written in the blue of an indelible pencil; yellow
crow's-feet, which rayed outward from his eyes, were deep as claw-prints
in damp clay.
"Becky, help me off with my shoes; heavy like lead they feel."
"Poil, unlace your papa's shoes. Since I got to dress for dinner I can't
stoop no more."
Miss Binswanger tugged daintily at her father's boots, staggering
backward at each pull.
"_Ach_, go way, Pearlie! Better than that I can do myself."
"See, mamma; nothing suits him."
Mrs. Binswanger regarded her husband's batrachian sallowness with
anxious eyes; her large bosom heaved under its showy lace yoke, and her
short, dimpled hands twirled at their rings.
"To-night, Julius, if you don't do like the doctor says I telephone him
to come. That a man should be such a coward! It don't do you no good to
take only one sleeping-tablet; two, he said, is what you need."
"Too much sleeping-powder is what killed old man Knauss."
"_Ach_, Julius, you heard yourself what Dr. Ellenburg said. Six of the
little pink tablets he said it would take to kill a man. How can two of
'em hurt you? Already by the bed I got the box of 'em waiting, Julius,
with an orange so they don't even taste."
"It ain't doctors and their _gedinks_, Becky, can do me good. Pink
tablets can't make me sleep. I--_ach_, Becky, I'm tired--tired."
Isadore rose from the couch-bed and punched his head-print out of the
cushion.
"Lay here, pa."
"Na, na, I go me to bed. Such a thing full of lumps don't rest me like a
sofa at home. Na, I go me to bed, Becky."
Isadore relaxed to the couch once more, pillowed his head on interlaced
hands, yawned to the ceiling, blew two columns of cigarette-smoke
through his nostrils, and watched them curl upward.
"This ain't so worse, pa."
"I go me to bed."
"For a little while, Julius, can't you stay up? At nine o'clock comes
Max to see Poil. I always say a young man thinks more of a young girl
when her parents stay in the room a minute."
Isadore fitted his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes and flung one
reclining limb over the other.
"What Max Teitlebaum thinks of Pearlie I already know. To-day he invited
me to lunch with him."
"Izzy!"
"Izzy! Why you been so close-mouthed?"
Mrs. Binswanger threw her short, heavy arm full length across the
table-top and leaned toward her son, so that the table-lamp lighted her
face with its generous scallop of chin and exacerbated the concern in
her eyes.
"You had lunch to-day with Max Teitlebaum, and about Poil you talked!"
"That's what I said."
Miss Binswanger leaned forward in her low rocker, suddenly pink as each
word had been a fillip to her blood, and a faint terra-cotta ran under
the olive of her skin, lighting it.
"Like--fun--you--did!"
"All right then, missy, I'm lyin', and won't say no more."
"I didn't mean it, Izzy!"
"Izzy, tell your sister what he said."
"Well, right to my face she contradicts me."
"Please, Izzy!"
"Well, he--he likes you, all righty--"
"Did he say that about me, honest, Izz?"
Her breath came sweet as thyme between her open lips, and her eyes could
not meet her mother's gaze, which burned against her lids.
"See, Poil! Wake up a minute, papa, and listen. When I mentioned Max
Teitlebaum, papa, you always said a grand boy like one of the Teitlebaum
boys, with such prospects, ain't got no time for a goil like our Poil.
Always I told you that you got to work up the appetite. See, papa, how
things work out! See, Poil! What else did he have to say, Izzy--he likes
her, eh?"
Isadore turned on his side and flecked a rim of ash off his cigarette
with a manicured forefinger.
"Don't get excited too soon, ma. He didn't come out plain and say
anything, but I guess a boy like Max Teitlebaum thinks we don't need a
brick house to fall on us."
"What you mean, Izzy?"
"What I mean? Say, ain't it as plain as the nose on your face? You
don't need two brick houses to fall on you, do you?"
Mrs. Binswanger admitted to a mental phthisis, and threw out her hands
in a gesture of helplessness.
"Believe me, Izzy, maybe I am dumb. So bad my head works when your papa
worries me, but what you mean I don't know."
"Me neither, Izzy!"
"Say, there ain't much to tell. He likes Pearlie--that much he wasn't
bashful to me about. He likes Pearlie, and he wants to go in the general
store and ladies' furnishing goods business. Just clothing like his
father's store he hates. Why should he stay in a business, he says, that
is already built up? His two married brothers, he says, is enough with
his father in the one business."
"Such an ambitious boy always anxious to do for hisself. I wish, Izzy,
you had some of his ambitions. You hear, Poil, in the same business as
papa he wants to go?"
Mrs. Binswanger rocked complacently, a smile crawled across her lips,
and she nodded rhythmically to the tilting of her rocking-chair, her
eyes closed in the pleasant phantasmagoria of a dream.
Mr. Binswanger slumped lower in his chair.
"A good head for business that Max Teitlebaum has on him. Like your
mamma says, Izzy, you should have one just half so good."
"There you go again, pa, pickin', pickin'! If you'd give a fellow a
start and lend him a little capital--I'd have some ambition, too, and
start for myself."
Mr. Binswanger leaped forward full stretch, as a jetty of flame shoots
through a stream of oil.
"For yourself! On what? From where would I get it? Cut it out from my
heart? Two months already I begged you to come out by me in the store
and see if you can't help start something to get back the trade--How we
need young blood in the store to get--"
"Aw, I--"
"Five thousand dollars I give you for to lose in the ladies'
ready-to-wear. Another white elephant we need in the family yet. Not
five thousand dollars outside my insurance I got to my name, and even if
I did have it I wouldn't--"
"Julius!"
"I mean it, so help me! Even if I did have it, not a cent to a boy what
don't listen to his old father."
"For God's sakes, pa, quit your hollering; if you ain't got it to your
name I'm sorry for Pearlie."
"For me?"
"You think, pa, a boy like Max Teitlebaum, a boy that banker Finburg's
daughter is crazy after, is getting married only because you got a nice
daughter?"
"What do you mean, Izzy?"
"The woods are full of 'em just as nice. I didn't need no brick house
to fall on me to-day at lunch. He didn't come right out and say nothing,
but when he said he wanted to get in a business he could build up, right
away I seen what he meant."
"What?"
"Sure I seen it. I guess his father gives him six or seven thousand
dollars to get his start, and just so much he wants from the girl's
side. He can get it easy, too. If--if you'd fork over, pa, I--him and I
could start maybe together and--"
"You--you--"
"Your papa, Izzy, can do for his girl just like the best can do for
theirs Julius, can't you?"
"_Gott in Himmel!_ I--I--you--you pack of wolfs, you!"
"Such names you can't call your wife, Julius! Just let me tell you that!
Such names you can't call me!"
Anger trembled in Mrs. Binswanger's vocal cords like current running
over a wire. But Mr. Binswanger sprang suddenly to his feet and crashed
the white knuckles of his clenched fist down on the table with a force
that broke the flesh. The red lights of anger lay mirrored in the pool
of his eyes like danger lanterns on a dark bridge are reflected in black
water.
"Wolfs--wolfs, all of you! You--you--to-night you got me where I am at
an end! To-night you got to _know_--I--I can't keep it in no more--you
got--to _know_ to-night--to-night!"
His voice caught in a tight knot of strangulation; he was dithering and
palsied.
"To-night--you--you got to know!"