Short-throated, her heavy body plodding on swollen, edemic ankles, her bobbed hair thick and graying about her wide, fleshy face, Mom was wearing a freshly laundered, fire-engine-red housedress with white shrimplike curlicues on it and a red bow at the back; she was wearing the freshly laundered housedress l’kuvet Shabbes. She took the box of household matches from the top of the green icebox, brought it over to the table, and extracting a match, struck a light against the sandpaper strip on the side. Broad brow knit, her sorrowful eyes intent, she lit the candles one after the other. Then she blew out the flame on the end of the match and placed it in the ashtray near Ira’s pipe. Covering her face with her puffy, workaday hands, she recited the traditional prayer under her breath and in scarcely articulate Hebrew, so that all Ira could make out were the long-imbued sounds of the incantation that began all Hebrew benedictions: “Baruch atah adonoi elohenu melekh ha oylum. .” And the terminal words, when she removed her hands from before her face: “Uhmein seluh.”
Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men, he with his horrid crew,
Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf,
Confounded, though immortal—
“He could be here an hour ago if he wanted to.” Mom’s words knit into Milton’s printed ones. “How long does it take to clean up after a breakfast-lunch job? To fill the salt and pepper cellars, the ketchup and the mustard bottles, the sugar bowls. He tells me he spends the time in between that and coming home inspecting business prospects. But I know better.”
“Yes?” impatiently Ira skimmed the text for his cue word, found it: immortal. But his doom/Reserv’d him to more wrath; for now the thought/Both of lost happiness and lasting pain/Torments him—
“He slips into a movin pickchehr.”
“Yeh?” Ira looked up again.
“Me he never takes along. I’m a stock, a block—”
“Mom!”
“Ah, that’s right, you’re studying.”
“Well, what else? I’ve got a test, a midterm test it’s called, and it’s being given on Monday.”
“Ah, ah. Forgive me. I chatter.”
“I don’t mind. I’m used to it. But not when you’re talking about Pop. You understand?”
“I understend. But my heart overflows.”
“Yeah, I know. But you upset me.”
“Well, let’s talk about something else. Or do you wish to study?”
“I don’t know. It all depends,” Ira relented. “Just don’t talk about Pop.”
“When Minnie is home, we have a hundred things to talk about, don’t you know, about women’s wear, about rags and relatives, what he said and what she said, about cooking and window curtains. But with you, Ira, I have to unburden myself.”
“Well, please don’t. Or I’ll begin studying again. Maybe I better anyway. I’ve got about a hundred and fifty pages to review—‘review’ means reading over again what I’ve already read before.” He translated the English word into Yiddish, and was caught off-guard by a yawn. “Go ahead.”
“Noo, let’s talk of other things,” Mom said resignedly. She turned off the burner under the frying pan in which she had been frittering croutons in chicken fat. Next to the soup pot was a discolored old bean crock, and after removing the last of the croutons, she drained the chicken schmaltz into the crock. He ought not to be watching her, Ira told himself; he had more important things to do. Nor should he be talking to her either. He had learned long ago that the euphoria of Friday afternoon wasn’t as far from the grind of Monday morning as the extravagant mirage of the weekend made it seem. And the midterm on Milton was only the first of the exams coming up. One in Modern European History. At least two more in the ed courses. Blah. Interim quizzes already indicated that at the rate he was going, by the end of the spring term, he’d still be lagging behind a credit or more toward his B.S. degree at graduation.
No, he ought not to be watching her or talking to her, but he felt like taking a break. Strange, though they were whole worlds apart in schooling, in attainment, and — what was the right word? — in milieu, mental milieu as well as environmental, and there was much, much he could no longer share with her, and much he would never dream of sharing with her, abominations that would have grieved and horrified her, still she was Mom. Her brooding temperament meshed with his as it always had, and did even now, despite his advantages, his college education, his cultivated friends.
She still understood him, intuitively, imaginatively, understood him in the realm of feeling. Unknowingly, she had indoctrinated him into tragedy, given him a penchant for it, the tragic outlook. He recognized that fact, now that he had grasped the rudiments of how to form abstractions, to generalize. She was the source of his tragic bent, and that was their bond.
“Let’s talk of how people work their way up in the world.” Mom took the frying pan to the sink and began wiping the inside with a sheet of Yiddish newspaper. “Agreed?”
“All right,” Ira conceded warily.
“There’s my sister Mamie. She has a new radio. They already had a phonograph. She has a telephone, hot running water, a large apartment with steam heat—”
“Stimma hitta, hotta watta, alavata, talafana,” Ira jeered indulgently out of Joyce.
“What?”
“Oh, I was just joking. So what about Mamie?”
“From a little cap maker, her husband, Jonas, is now a partner in a restaurant. No? And Mamie is a — how do you call it? Superintendent of the house, and gets her rent free.”
Mom attacked the frying pan with a liberal salvo of Rokeach’s scouring powder. “Sometimes I think they guard themselves from me, for fear I might blight their prosperity with the evil eye. But what, think I. Envy you? Never. You’re my sister. Thrive. Prosper.”
She flushed the frying pan under the faucet. “It will have to wait until I do the supper dishes. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Tockin, tockin,” Ira patronized in Yiddish.
“As cold water flows like icicles from our faucet in winter, so my fate is my fate. Not only to be bitterly poor, but yoked to that lunatic.”
“Mom!” Ira warned.
“It’s not true?”
“You said you wouldn’t talk about Pop. You’re going crazy on the subject.”
“Crazy? I?”
“Yeah, lately.”
“God be my judge if I am crazy.”
“All right, then you’re not. I just can’t stand it!”
“He’s crazy!” She had been stung too badly to contain herself. “Who doesn’t know his capers? Through the length and breadth of the waiters’ union they know it. Boss and busboy, who doesn’t know my little Chaim? And patrons too — beyond doubt. This one he will tell, ‘If you’re in such a hurry, why didn’t you come in earlier,’ and the other one who points to the tip left on the table, he will say, ‘If you didn’t take it, nobody else will’—”