“If she ever owns a candy-store and if she runs it the way she keeps her room there, then God help her customers. Here when she leaves hair-pins on the floor as thick as a stubble, all one can do is tread on them; there, they’ll eat them, mark me. They’ll be in every tray. And that red fox-tail she wears in her hair, they’ll find it in the ice-cream. Has she ever put anything back where it belonged? Does she ever do anything with care? And the meals she’ll cook him, Almighty God! With that rash, blind haste of hers, his stomach will be like mine the years before you came.”
“Oh, she’ll learn, Albert! She’ll learn! She’ll have to! I couldn’t cook either before I married! After all we had servants when I was a girl — they did all the house-keeping, house-cleaning, cooking.”
“Bah!” he interrupted her contemptuously. “I don’t believe it. She’ll never learn anything! And what does she know about children? Nothing! What a life they’ll lead her! And she them. Two half-grown wenches on her hands the day she marries! Strangers to her. Hi! What a bedlam! A fate to befall one’s enemies! Well!” He shrugged impatiently. “All I ask is to have it over with soon!”
David who had gotten on his clean shirt and tie by this time, maneuvered about to catch his mother’s eye. She opened them wide in pleasure.
“Look how he gleams, your son!”
Impassively, his father’s eyes rested on him, a moment, and away. “Why doesn’t he comb his hair?”
“I’ll do it!” She went quickly to the sink, wet the comb and passed it caressingly through his hair. “It was browner when you were very young, my son. My handsome son!”
His father reached out for the grey milk-route book that lay on the ice-box, opened it impassively, let the page ruffle under his fingers, (David remembered the ink stains once engraved upon them) and scowled.
“This belongs in my coat.” He said abruptly, and was silent.
About half an hour later, Aunt Bertha and the newcomer arrived. Being present when a stranger was introduced to his father was always an ordeal for David, and this time it seemed more trying than ever. Aunt Bertha was flustered and red with embarrassment, which made her speech and her movements all the more hectic; so that her clipped, flighty, whirlwind of words and gestures caused his father to grow as stiff and aloof as if he were carved from stone. When the two men shook hands, his father merely grunted in reply to the greeting, and never meeting the other’s eyes, glared grimly over his shoulders. Mr. Sternowitz, disconcerted, cast a quick, bewildered glance at Aunt Bertha who stabbed her brother-in-law first with a frown of pucker-nosed hate, and then replied with a reassuring, I-told-you-so smile. That dread moment over, at the suggestion of David’s mother, they sat down, and seated, relaxed guardedly.
While conversation, in which David’s father took no part, circulated about the room in short nervous spurts, concerned chiefly with dentists and with the difference between Aunt Bertha’s “absah” and Mr. Sternowitz’s “ulster,” David examined the newcomer. He was, as Aunt Bertha had said, a little man, very long-nosed, blue-eyed, and sallow. A pale, narrow mustache, the tips of which he kept trying to draw down and bite, followed the margin of thin lips. His ears were overly large, soft-looking and fuzzy almost as red plush. In his small mouth as he spoke, gold teeth gleamed, and his sallow brow that knitted easily into long wrinkles, crept up in quick perspectives into the brownish kinky hair. Above his mustache, his face appeared good-natured, meek yet shrewd, below it, despite the small mouth and receding chin, he gave one the impression of peevish stubbornness. Altogether he looked rather insignificant and even a little absurd. And David scrutinizing him felt increasingly disappointed not so much for himself but for his aunt’s sake.
After lauding the dentist — both he and Aunt Bertha had been present the evening an old woman had come to the office to test out her newly-made plates, and after eating a pear and a heavily poppy-seeded roll, had gone away satisfied — Mr. Sternowitz drifted to the leggings business and prophesied that it would soon disappear under earth. Children were wearing far less leggings than before. And it was because of the uncertainty of his future earnings, he informed them hesitantly, that he thought a man’s wife ought to have an independent income — with which Aunt Bertha emphatically concurred. Uncertain at first, but continually spurred on and encouraged by Aunt Bertha and David’s mother, Mr. Sternowitz gradually lost some of his apprehension at the other man’s chill taciturnity and began to speak more freely. However, whenever his eyes met David’s father’s, the expression on his face tended to freeze into one of ingratiating self-effacement. David sympathized with him. He guessed that like himself, Mr. Sternowitz felt the necessity of continually humbling himself before the relentless, unwinking scrutiny of those eyes, the grey unrelaxing visage. Everyone had to bow down before his father, except Aunt Bertha, and as Mr. Sternowitz’s humility and self-deprecation increased, she became more chagrined and defiant.
David’s mother had begun serving supper when Mr. Sternowitz, taking a preliminary nip at his mustache said, “My father was a servant!”
Up till now Aunt Bertha had given vent to her impatience by merely clicking her tongue against the roof of the mouth. But now apparently deciding on more strenuous measures, she inquired in a barbed tone, “And in rainy weather he carried two children on his back to the cheder. Didn’t he, Nathan?”
“Yes.” Mr. Sternowitz lifted hurt eyes from his plate. “So he did. I think I told you.”
“Well, do you have to blare it out to everyone the first time you meet them? Won’t it keep? Isn’t it dry enough? Why don’t you tell us about your mother’s cousin who was a doctor? That’s something to brag about!”
Above his mustache, Mr. Sternowitz looked crushed. “I didn’t think of it,” he said apologetically. But below it, as if some belated impulse thrust it out, his small chin worked its way forward. And he looked confidentially at David’s father. “But he was a servant!” he maintained.
“Yes! Tell them everything!” Aunt Bertha tossed her head resentfully. “And your mother was blind when she bore you and purblind during your infancy. And she fed you vinegar instead of sugar-water. That’s why you’re so homely!”
“One has to speak about something,” he maintained persistently. “Especially if everyone else is quiet.”
“Ach! There’s a forest of somethings!” Aunt Bertha countered fretfully. “I suppose when I go to see your relatives, you’ll expect me to tell them in the first gasp that the only suitor I ever had—” Here she began to gesticulate and grimace violently—“Was a man who s-s-stammered. And when the marriage-broker said to him, Speak! Ox! What does he say, but, D-d-did y-your g-g-grand-m-mother l-like ch-ch-ch-cheese. Bah! Well I won’t!” she concluded breathlessly.
“Have mercy, Bertha!” her sister said “What difference will it make whether he tells it sooner or later. We’re bound to know one another.”
“Perhaps!” was her significant retort.
Dejected, Mr. Sternowitz peeped up furtively from his plate first at David’s father, still unsmiling and aloof, and then at Aunt Bertha, petulant. Then he blinked embarrassedly, tried to laugh, but without success, and uncertainly, “What did you say? I mean you — to — to the suitor?”
“I said, you’ll have to ask my grandmother.” She screwed her lips together tartly. “She’s dead.”
“Ai!” Mr. Sternowitz gnawed his mustache and looked around half-rueful, half-pleased. “She’s going to lead me a fearful life, no? And even if I am a father of children, nothing will help me. Now, my first wife was older than I. But she had no tongue and she submitted. It may be that I’ll have a younger one this time and—”