“Why, Albert!” She flinched before his harsh scrutiny. “I am dismayed! I am downcast. But what can I do? My only hope is that this — this hostility — or what one may call it — is — is only temporary! What can it be? For a time perhaps! Something worrying him that he won’t disclose! Why, it may be all over by to-morrow!”
“Yes. It may indeed! Something may! But my belief is that no man would become a stranger to me overnight unless he thought I had wronged him. Isn’t that so? And he — he’s worse than a stranger — he’s a foe! Avoiding me as if the sight of my face were a stab! Looking past me darkly! Ha! It’s more than something transient! It’s — what’s the matter?”
She was pale. With the glass pitcher in one hand, she strained vainly with the other to open the tap of the faucet. “I can’t open it, Albert! You must have shut it too tightly when you washed. I want some water for the table.”
“Are you weak suddenly?” He rose, strode sourly to the sink, twisted the tap open. “And as for him—” he stared ominously at the gushing water—“if he doesn’t change, he’d better be careful! He’ll find that I can change even more!”
There was a pause, a gathering of strain. Silently his mother set the pitcher on the table, went to the stove and began ladling out the steaming yellow pea-soup into the bowls. Stray drops that fell from the brown pancakes as she transferred them from the pot to the dishes hissed over the stove lids. The odor was savory. But David, glancing hurriedly at his father’s gloomy face, resolved to eat more carefully than he had ever eaten in his life. So far these sombre eyes had scarcely rested on him; now he felt himself trying to contract within himself to vanish from their ken. And failing, concentrated on the frosted moisture of the glass pitcher and how each drop awaited ripeness before it slid.
His father reached for the bread — it seemed to ease the strain. Relieved, David glanced up. His mother came near, her face strangely sorrowful and brooding, incongruous somehow, dissociated completely from her task of carrying a platter of soup. She set it down before his father, and straightening, touched his shoulder timidly.
“Albert!”
“Hm?” He stopped chewing, twirled the spoon he had just picked up.
“Perhaps I should ask you this after supper when your mind is easier, but—”
“What?”
“You — you won’t do anything rash? Please! I beg you!”
“I’ll know what to do when the hour falls,” he answered darkly. “Don’t let that trouble you.”
In spite of himself, David started. Against a sudden screen of darkness he had seen a dark roof, a hammer brandished over pale and staring cobbles.
“Pouh!” his father snorted, lowering his spoon. “Salt? Don’t you use that any more?”
“Not salted? I’m sorry Albert! Everything I’ve done today has gone awry — even the soup!” She laughed desperately. “I’m a good cook!”
“What should trouble you so much?” His sharp gaze rested on David. “Has he been lost again or up to some new madness?”
“No! No! Not him—! Begin eating, child! Not him! I don’t know! Nothing I did today had my eyes and my wits in the doing. Every hour brought some fresh confusion. It was one of those fateful days that make people superstitious. There’s a handkerchief in the yard this very moment. Who knows what made me drop it!”
His father shrugged. “At least you were alone. There was no one watching you! No one prodding you with his eyes into blunders.”
“You mean — him again?”
“Yes! Him! Twice I didn’t feed the sheet into the press just so. They wrinkled, crushed! The underpad was inked! I was ten minutes each time cleaning them! I tell you he gloated! I saw him!” He stopped eating, hammered the spoon on the table. “There’s evil brewing inside him! He’s waiting, waiting for something! I could feel his eyes on my back all day, but never there when I turned to face him! It took my mind off my work! I fed the press as though I were lame! I couldn’t have done worse the first day I began! Now too soon! Now too late! Now just missing! And then the mussed paper caught in the roller — in the gummy ink. I had to take the whole thing apart! And every minute the feeling that he was watching me. Ha!” He breathed harshly. His lips writhed back and his words battered against the barred teeth. “It’s more than I can bear! It’s more than I’ll stand! If he’s waiting for something, he’ll get it!”
“Albert!” She had stopped eating as well and was gazing at him panic stricken. “Don’t—!” Her unsteady fingers closed her lips.
“I tell you he’ll hear from me! I’m no lamb!”
“If — if it’s that bad, Albert. If it doesn’t change, and he’s — he’s that way — why don’t you l-leave! There are other places!”
“Leave?” He repeated ominously. “Leave! So. But the first man I’ve ever trusted in this cursed land to treat me like a foe. The worst of all! Leave!” He stared at his plate bitterly, shook his head. “You’re a strange one yourself. You’ve trembled every time I had a new job — trembled for me to keep it. I could read it in your face — you pressed me to be patient. And now you urge me to leave. Well, we’ll see! We’ll see! But when I leave he’ll know it, never fear! And do me a favor. Take those plates away.” He nodded toward Luter’s place. “It’s as though someone were dead.”
XVI
TUESDAY afternoon, his mother’s drawn, distracted face was too much for him to bear. Without asking her to wait in the hallway, he had fled into the street, and without calling to her, had come up again, alone. Neither Annie, who never hobbled past without sticking out her awl-like tongue, nor Yussie’s reiterated, “Cry-baby,” nor the cellar-door at the end of the vacant hallway were half as painful to endure as the stiff anguish in his mother’s face or the numb silence of the hours of waiting for his father. Again and again, he could almost have wished that by some miracle Luter would return, would be there beside his father when the door was opened. But his mother set only three places around the table. There would be no miracle then. She knew. Luter would never return!
And when his father came home, he came in alone again. The sight of him this evening was terrifying. Never, not even the night he had beaten David, did he radiate, so fell, so electric a fury. It was as though his whole body were smouldering, a stark, throbbing, curdling emanation flowed from him, a dark, corrosive haze that was all the more fearful because David sensed how thin an aura it was of the terrific volcano clamped within. He refused to speak. He scarcely touched his food. His eyelids, normally narrow, seemed to have stretched beyond human roundness, revealing the whole globe of the eye in which the black pupils almost engulfed the brown. He looked at no one. His mad, burnished gaze roved constantly above their heads along the walls as if he were tracing and retracing the line of the moulding beneath the ceiling. Between the hollow of mouth and chin, his twitching lips threw a continual flicker of shadow. There was a place above the stiff sickle nostrils that looked dented — so pinched and white they were. Only once did he break his silence and then only for a brief time in a voice as harsh and labored as a croak.
“Flour? Why? Two sacks of flour? Two? Under the shelf? Under the Passover dishes?”
She stared at him mutely, too bewildered, too panic-stricken to answer.
“Hanh? Are they going to wall you in? Or is the long lean year crouching?”
Her whole body before she answered quivered forward as though shaking off layers and layers of some muffling, suffocating fabric.