“I thought you were going to fetch your mother,” he said to Philip somewhat impatiently. And when Philip started to leave, he said hastily, “I’ll go with you.” He had decided that the grandmother’s look was unfriendly, though in the dusty green-tinged light that came through the lampshade it was difficult to get a definite impression. But he felt her antagonism. In a shambling gait — the heat made him heavy — he followed Philip down several turns of the stairs to the neighbor’s flat. Philip knocked, and in a few seconds Elena came hurrying out to them, eager and fearful.
“Oh, Asa, you,” she said. “And the specialist? Did you bring him?”
“He said between seven and eight. He ought to be here soon.”
The neighbor, Mr Villani, smoking a twisted stogie, appeared in the hallway and cried out to her, “You let us know right away what he says about the boy up there.” He looked at Leventhal, perfectly unconstrained in his curiosity. “How do?” he said to him.
“This is my husband’s brother,” said Elena.
“Yes, sure,” said Villani taking the cigar out of his mouth. Leventhal impassively looked back at him, his eyes solemn and uncommunicative, only a little formally inquiring. A drop of sweat ran down his cheek. Villani, one hand in his pocket, spread his trousers wide. “You look like Mr Leventhal, all right,” he said. He turned to Elena. “And what the doctor tells you, you do it, missis, you hear? We’re gonna pull that boy through, so don’t worry. What I think is he’s only got summer fever,” he said to Leventhal. “It ain’t serious. My kids had it. But this missis is the worrying kind.”
“It’s plenty serious,” said Elena. She spoke quietly, but Leventhal, watching her closely and paying particular attention to the expression of her eyes, felt a pang of his peculiar dread at their sudden widening.
“Ah, ah, how do you know? Are you a doctor? Wait a while.”
“The man is right, I think, Elena,” said Leventhal.
“Sure I am. You got to have confidence in the doctor.” An impassioned, sharp sound caught in his throat and he flung his arm out in a short, stiff, eloquent curve. “What’s the matter! Sure! You listen to me. That boy is all right.” The cigar glowed in his fingers.
“She’ll have confidence,” Leventhal assured him.
They started upstairs. On the fourth floor Elena stopped and with an excited escape of breath, “Phillie, what did you tell me — Grandma’s here?”
“She just came.”
“Oh my!” She turned with anxious abruptness to Leventhal. “What did she say to you, anything?”
“Not a single word.”
“Oh, Asa, if she does… Oh, I hope to God she doesn’t. Let her say what she wants. Just let it pass.”
“Oh, sure,” he said.
“She’s a very peculiar type of person, my mother. She acted terrible when Max and I got married. She wanted to throw me out of the house because I was going with him. I couldn’t bring him in. I had to meet him outside.”
“Max mentioned once or twice…”
“She’s an awfully strict Catholic. She said if I married anybody but a Catholic she wouldn’t have any more to do with me. She would curse me. So when I left the house she did. I didn’t even see her until Phillie was born. I still don’t see her much, but since Mickey is sick she’s here pretty often. If Max is home she won’t even come in. She’s very superstitious, my mother. She has all the old-country ways. She thinks she’s still in Sicily.” Elena spoke in a near-whisper, covering the side of her face with her hand.
“Don’t worry, I’ll know how to take her.”
“She just is that way,” Elena explained, smiling helplessly.
“You can stop worrying.”
The old woman met them in the hallway and she began immediately to speak to her daughter, her eyes occasionally moving to Leventhal’s face. Her voice had what to him was a characteristic Italian hoarseness. Her long head was drawn back rigidly on her black shoulders. He observed how she turned down her underlip, exposing her teeth as she lingered on a syllable. Elena, dejected, shook her head and answered in short phrases. Leventhal tried to seize a word here and there. He understood nothing. Suddenly Elena interrupted her mother, crying out, “Where? Why didn’t you say so right away, Mamma? Where is he? The man is here!” she exclaimed to Leventhal. “The specialist!” She ran in. Leventhal, walking behind the grandmother in the hall leading to the bedroom, contorted his face in an unusual release of feeling. Ugly old witch! To make her daughter wait and listen to her complaints before telling her the doctor had arrived. “Parents!” he muttered. “Oh, yes, parents! My eye, parents!” He was tempted to jostle her.
They entered the bedroom. The doctor had pulled up Mickey’s shirt and was listening to his heart. The child seemed scarcely awake; he was dull and submitted to the examination, listless with the fever, lifting his eyes only to his mother, identifying rather than appealing to her. Philip leaned on the bedpost to see him.
“Phil, don’t shake, stay off it,” Elena said.
The doctor turned a glance over his shoulder. He was a young man with a long, rosy face and thin, gold-rimmed lenses over his close-set eyes. While he pressed the stethoscope on the child’s chest and shoulders, he looked steadily at Leventhal, evidently taking him for the father. At first Leventhal was bothered by this error. Soon, however, he grasped the fact that the doctor was trying to tell him the illness was serious. Unobserved by Elena, who was folding back the counterpane, he gave him a gloomy nod to show that he understood. The doctor let the earpieces of the instrument fall around his neck and felt the boy’s arms with his clean red fingers. In the yellowish, stiff web over the blackness of the window, the ferns and the immense moths were shot with holes and gaps. The kitchen air and the noises of the court entered the room. The boy was raised and his pillow turned over.
“You should sponge him every few hours,” said the doctor.
“I did it this afternoon. I’ll do it again soon,” said Elena.
She had been whispering to him from time to time and now she spoke up eagerly, almost joyfully. She seemed to feel there was nothing to fear any longer. “I trust him so much,” she said to Leventhal, gazing at the doctor. Leventhal’s hands were damp and chill. He was beginning to feel ill from the sudden doubling of his tension. He wiped his face, passing the handkerchief over the bristles on his cheek and leaving a piece of lint on them. He was sure he had interpreted the doctor’s silent communication correctly. Elena’s hopefulness stunned him. He turned, careworn, looking at her and at the children, and a few moments passed before it came to him that this burden after all belonged to his brother. At once he was furious with Max for being away. He had no right to go in the first place. Leventhal felt for his wallet; he had put Max’s card in it. He would wire him tonight. Or no, a night letter was better, he could put more into it. He began to form the message in his mind. “Dear Max, if you can tear yourself away from what you’re doing… if you can manage to get away for a while…” He would not spare him. The harsher the better. Just look at what he left behind him: this house, a tenement; Elena, who might herself need taking care of; the children they had brought into the world. Leventhal returned to the composition of the night letter. “You are needed here. Imperative.” That it was he, almost a stranger to the family, who was sending the message, should show Max how serious the matter was. Ah, what a business! And the grandmother? If anything happened to the boy she would consider it in the nature of a judgment on the marriage. The marriage was impure to her. Yes, he understood how she felt about it. A Jew, a man of wrong blood, of bad blood, had given her daughter two children, and that was why this was happening. No one could have persuaded Leventhal that he was wrong. Hardly hearing what was being said in the room, he contemplated her grimly, her grizzled temples, the thin straight line of her nose, the severity of her head pressed back on her shoulders, the baring of her teeth as she opened her lips to make a remark to her daughter. No, he was not wrong. From her standpoint it was inevitable punishment — that was how she would see it, a punishment. Whatever else she might feel — and after all the boy was her grandson — she would feel this first.