“Flour!” Her voice under the strain was high-pitched and hysteric. “A sale at the grocer’s. Nev-Neven’s Street! There in that market!” She trembled again, swallowed, striving desperately to calm herself. “I thought since we used so much, it would be wise to — oh!” She sprang to her feet in horror. “You mean why did I leave them under the Passover dishes! I’ll take them away! This moment!”
“No! No! Leave them! Leave them! Leave them!” (David thought the fierce crescendo of his voice would never end) “Sit down. The mice won’t get them!”
She sat down stunned. “I’ll get them later,” she said dully. “I shouldn’t have left them there. I can no longer think.” And taking a deep breath. “One is tempted to buy more than one needs these days, things are so cheap. Is there anything you’d like me to get you? Smoked salmon? Sour cream, thick almost as butter. They say they mix flour into it! Black olives?”
“My head is splitting.” His eyes were roving along the walls again. “Don’t say more than you can help.”
“Can’t I do something for you? A cold compress?”
“No.”
She shut her eyes, rocked slightly and said no more.
David would have whimpered, but dared not. The intolerable minutes unreeled from an endless spool of nightmare.…
By Wednesday afternoon, another and even more disturbing change had come over his mother. Yesterday afternoon and the day before, she had been impatient with him, unresponsive to his questions, distracted, disjointed in her answers. Now she listened to him with a fixity that made him increasingly uneasy. Wherever he walked about the kitchen, wherever he stood or sat, her eyes followed him, and there was something so fervent, so focused in her gaze that he found his own eyes not daring to meet hers. She did not chide him to-day for dawdling over his after-school bread and butter, or postponing the moment of having to go down. On the contrary, everything was reversed. This afternoon it was he who ate rapidly in order to be ready to go down sooner, and it was his mother who sought to delay him. “And what else?” She would ask. The moment he had completed narrating some incident in school. “And what else happened? What did you see then?” And always her tone had the same rapt, insistent note, and she hung on his every word with such a feverish hungered gaze that several times a curious shudder ran through him, a chill, as if the floor for a second had opened beneath him and he were plunging down a void.
“But on your way home,” she urged. “You haven’t told me. Was there nothing new?”
“No-o.” He hesitated, his eyes wandering about the kitchen avoiding that over-bright, clinging gaze. When would she be satisfied, he wondered, when would she let him go? Uneasily he rummaged among his memories, found the only thing he knew he hadn’t told her yet. “There was a man yesterday.” He began. “On the street that’s the other side of school.” He paused, hoping against hope her interest had flagged.
“Yes! Yes!” Her voice was like a prod. “Yes!”
“And the man, he was making a sidewalk. Like that.” He palmed the green sheet of oil cloth on the table. “With an iron with a handle. A new sidewalk.”
“They’re building up Brownsville!” She smiled at him with frightening intentness. “And? You unwilling, silent, beloved one! And?”
“And when the man wasn’t looking … and the sidewalk was green — it’s green when it’s new.”
“I have seen that also.”
“And a boy came and the man wasn’t looking — he was pushing the iron here. And the boy stepped on it — like that.” He slipped down from the chair, toed the linoleum, “And made a hole with his shoe. Like that—”
Her face had sagged strangely, lips parting before a slow emission of breath. The taut, pale planes of her cheeks seemed to have slipped the chin-bone, overlapped it. Under the raised brows the intent brown eyes were focused on a distance so vast it returned upon her. In dismay, David stopped speaking and blinking with dismay watched her.
“I heard you! I heard you!” She shook her head breathlessly. “Yes! Yes! I heard you!” Through long corridors of brooding her gaze skimmed toward him again. “Yes!”
“Why did you look th-that way?” He wavered between alarm and curiosity.
“Nothing! Nothing at all! I did that too when I was a girl, stepping on a road, new-made. But mine was black! Nothing! Nothing at all! And then what? What did the man do!”
“The man,” he continued uneasily, “the man didn’t see. And yesterday he did it … When I went to school after lunch yesterday. And now there aren’t any more boards on it. And it’s hard like other sidewalks. Nearly white they powder it. And — and you can jump on it. Like that. And you can’t do anything. But he made that hole. And there’s a hole now. You can even see that little red iron on his shoe — in front. It made a hole too! And there’s a piece of cigarette in it already.”
“Naturally!”
“Why does it get so you can’t make a hole any more — even with an umbrella. A broken one I saw. Only sparks when you hit it.” He ducked under the hungering, round eyes. “You talk now.”
“No, you!”
“Aaaaa!”
“Won’t you?” she coaxed.
“I’m all finished now — with my bread,” he reminded her crossly.
“Do you want some more? Some milk?” The eager intensity with which her words followed one another seemed to squeeze letters out of syllables.
He shook his head, eyed her obliquely.
“You can stay with me for a while, beloved.” She opened her arms for him to come to her. “You don’t have to go down.”
He drooped, pouted, but finally trudged over to her and settled on her knee. All this time he had wanted very much to go down, to escape, but he had again caught a sound of pleading in her voice, an expectancy.
“I–I’ll stay here.”
“Oh, you do want to go down!” She unlocked her arms. “Yes you do! I’ve been keeping you. Come! I’ll get your coat!”
“No! No! I don’t! No, mama! I just — I just wanted to look out of the window. That’s what I wanted.”
“Is that all? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Only open. It has to be open.” Some condition was necessary to justify his hesitance. “Will you open it?”
“Of course!” She suddenly pressed him to her fervently, rocked him against her breast. “What would I do without my son in bitter hours? My son! But, darling, the window with the fire-escape before it. Not the other. Good? Sweet fragment! I’ll get a pillow for you to lean on. Do you want to go now?”
“Yes.” He squirmed free.
“First your sweater then. It’s cold out.”
She fetched it. And when he had pulled it on, both went up to the front-room where she opened the window before the little fire-escape, pulled the heavy white curtains aside, cleared the sill of pots and milk bottles and placed a pillow on it.
“And this you’ll want to kneel on.” She drew a chair up. “It can’t damage it any and you can look out much better. Your mittens?”
“No. I’m not cold.”
She leaned over his shoulder, sniffed the air. “It drills the nostrils. Do you see how blue it’s gotten over there, over those brown houses. How early! In the summer this would be late and Albert soon—” She stopped. The fingers on his shoulders twitched. “Ach! I threw a stone upon my own heart then!” With a slack and suddenly aimless hand she fondled his ears and the nape of his neck. “One cannot hide himself long from his fear.” She groaned softly and began drumming on the window pane just as she had drummed on the table yesterday and the day before. “Will you knit another dream for me if I come up later? No?” She patted his head and walked slowly from the front room.
Moodily, he leaned further out to stare down the street.
On the right there were children near the stores at the end of the block, girls skipping rope. Annie was turning. He could see the brace. When he squinted tightly he thought he could make out Yussie standing beside the boy on a tricycle, but wasn’t quite sure if that really was Yussie. Then he could have gone down and stayed near the house without being molested. It would have been better than just being half in the street and half out. He wondered why it was that one could be half in the street and half out and yet never be able to picture the street and the inside of the house together. He could picture the street and the yellow wall of his house, but not the inside. Once he had seen men tearing down the wall of an old wooden house. You could see the inside from the street — the wall paper and the chandelier, the black thickness between floors, windows, open doors. It was strange. Everything looked shrunken. Everything looked frightened.