The other eight were given to her at once, and were hit, and hated, and stamped upon. For many nights Anne-Marie's dreams were peopled with dead and resuscitated Herminas—placid, smiling Herminas with no legs; booted Herminas with large pieces broken out of their cheeks; fearful Herminas all right in the back, but with darksome voids where their faces ought to be under the clotted yellow hair.
She would have no more dolls, and her pleasures were taken where she found them mainly in the kitchen. She liked to wash dishes, because she was not allowed to; and she could be seen whisking a kitchen-towel under her arm in the brisk, important manner of Minna. She liked to see the butcher's man slap a piece of steak down on the table; and the laugh of the "coloured lady" who brought the washing was sweet in her ears. She also liked the piano that was played in the adjoining flat—the piano that drove Nancy to distraction and despair whenever she tried to work.
wrote Nancy, trying not to hear the climpering next door.
"Minna! Minna! What is that tune?" called Anne-Marie, jumping from her chair. "Is it 'Eastside, Westside,' or 'Paradise Alley'?"
"No, it ain't. It's 'Casey would waltz.'"
"Oh, is it? Sing it. Do sing it, Minna."
And from the kitchen came Minna's voice, a loud soprano:
Then Anne-Marie's childish falsetto:
Alas! even the cycle of child poems must wait until Nancy could afford a larger apartment, and a governess for the "lilial blue-veinèd flower of her desire." There was no "Stimmung" for lyrics in the left-top flat in 82nd Street.
Aldo was at home a good deal during the day-time, yawning, reading the interminable Sunday papers that lay about all the week, smoking cigarettes, and wishing they could afford this and that.
In the evenings he went out. His work, it seemed, was to be done more in the evening than in the day-time, so he explained to Nancy. He explained very little to Nancy. Once he had brought home one hundred dollars instead of twenty, but she had been so startled and aghast, so nervous and impatient to know how he had got it, and, above all, it had been so impossible to make her understand the subtleties of his duties to Mrs. Van Osten, that he had finally declared it was simply a present for an extra important piece of work he had had to do. And the next time he received a hundred dollars—about three months afterwards, when more arduous duties once more developed upon him—he took eighty to the Dime Savings-Bank, and brought the usual twenty dollars home.
As soon as the little savings-bank book was placed in his hand, the Caracciolo grandfather awoke in him again, and murdered the lazzarone who cared not for the morrow. He became heedful of little things, grudging of little expenses. The dingy flat was run on the strictest principles of economy, and when a dollar could be taken up the steps of the savings-bank and put away, he was happy. He had learned that by making deep, grateful eyes at Minna over the accounts, she would keep expenses down to please him; and many were the lumps of sugar and bits of butter taken from Mrs. Schmidl's larder by Minna's fat, pink hand and placed, sacrificial offerings, on the Della Roccas' shabby table.
Anne-Marie's pink hats and Minna-made frocks had to last through the seasons long after the "coloured lady" had washed every vestige of tint and vitality out of them, and they were a thorn in Nancy's eye. Nancy wore her pepper-and-salt dress day after day; it turned, and it dyed—black, and when it was no more, she got another like it.
The days passed meanly and quickly. And Nancy learned that one can be dingy, and sordid, and poverty-stricken, and yet go on living, and gently drift down into the habit of it, and hardly remember that things were ever otherwise.
The evenings only were terrible. When Minna had gone home, and Anne-Marie slept, and Aldo had sauntered out to meet some Italians, or had hurried in full evening-dress to his work, Nancy sat drearily in the "parlour." From mantelpiece, shelf, and what-not photographs of unknown people, friends of Mrs. Johnstone, the landlady, gazed at her with faded faces and in obsolete attire; actresses in boy's clothes, and large-faced children; chinless young men in turned-down collars; Mr. and Mrs. Johnstone in bridal attire; their first-born baby with no clothes on, now a clerk at Macy's. Hanging on the wall, with whitish eyes that followed Nancy about, was the enlarged photograph of dead Mr. Johnstone, and Nancy, in her loneliness, feared him. She covered him one evening with a table-cloth, but it was worse. When, on her arrival months ago, she had collected all these photographs and hidden them away in a closet, Mrs. Johnstone, who liked to drop in suddenly, had arrived, and looked round with a red face.
"You don't want to do that," she had said, taking all the pictures out again and setting them up in their places. She also would not allow the large ornamental piano-lamp, that took up half the stuffy little room, to be moved. It had cost thirty-two dollars. So it stood there in the dark-carpeted, obscure parlour, and its yellow silk shade with the grimy white silk roses pinned on it was an outrage to Nancy's pained gaze.
One evening at bed-time Anne-Marie said to her mother: "I like the girl next door."
"You do not know her, darling," said Nancy.
"Oh yes, I do. I talked to her from the back-window."
"What is her name?" said Nancy, unfastening strings and buttons on her daughter's back.
"Oh, she told me—I don't know. A little dry name like a cough."
Nancy laughed and kissed the nape of Anne-Marie's neck, which was plump, and fair, and sweet to smell. At that moment the girl-neighbour knocked and came in, with a bear made of chocolate for Anne-Marie. Her name—the dry name like a cough—was Peggy.
"I've just come in because I thought you seemed kind of lonesome," she said, looking round the parlour after Anne-Marie had been tucked in and left in the adjoining bedroom with the door ajar.
She then told Nancy that she worked in a hairdresser's shop down Broadway, "mostly fixing nails." "Sickening work," she added. "All those different hands I have to keep holding kind of turns me. Especially women's!"
Nancy laughed. Peggy offered to fix her nails for nothing, and after some hesitation Nancy allowed her to do so.
"My! you have hands quite like a lady," said Peggy; and the cup of Nancy's bitterness was full. Nancy quickly changed the subject.
"Is it you who play the piano?" she asked.
"No, my brother. He works in a shipping office. But he is great on music."
At this point Anne-Marie's voice was heard from the adjoining room: "What is that piece that was lovely?"
Peggy laughed, but could not say which piece Anne-Marie meant. After a while she went to call her brother, who came in, lanky and diffident, and was introduced as "George." Anne-Marie kept calling from her room about the piece that was lovely, and finally the young man went back to his flat, leaving the doors open, and played all the pieces of his repertoire.
But "the piece that was lovely" was not among them. Peggy and Nancy said: "She probably dreamt it." But Anne-Marie cried "No, no, no!" at the first note of every piece that was started. At last she wept, and was naughty and rude, and the bear's hindlegs, which she had not yet eaten, were taken away from her.
Peggy and George were very friendly, and promised to call again. They lived alone. Their parents had a sheep ranch in Dakota.
"Rotten place," said George. "New York is good enough for me." And they shook hands and left.
After that, when Mr. Johnstone frightened Nancy more than usual, she knocked at the wall in Anne-Marie's room with a hair-brush, and Peggy came in, and spent a friendly evening with her. Sometimes George came, too, and read the magazine supplements of the Sunday papers aloud. George read all the poems.