“Where’s your mother?”
“She’s in here. Who are you?”
“Your uncle,” said Leventhal. Coming into the hall he unavoidably pushed against the boy.
His sister-in-law hurried toward him from the kitchen. She had changed; she was heavier than when he had last seen her.
“Well, Elena?” he said.
“Oh, Asa, you’re here?” She reached for his hand.
“Sure I’m here. You asked me to come, didn’t you?”
“I tried to call you again, but they told me you were gone.”
“Why again?”
“Phillie, take Uncle’s coat,” said Elena.
“Doesn’t the bell work?”
“We disconnected it because of the baby.”
Leventhal dropped his raincoat into the boy’s arms and followed her into the dining-room where she busied herself with clearing a chair for him.
“Oh, look at the house,” she said. “I haven’t had time to clean up. My mind is just miles away. It’s already three weeks that I took down the curtains and I haven’t got them back yet. And look at me.” She put down the clothes she had lifted from the chair and showed herself to him with outspread arms. Her black hair was in disorder, she was wearing a nightgown under her cotton dress, her feet were bare. She smiled mournfully. Leventhal, impassive as usual, merely nodded. He observed that her eyes were anxious, altogether too bright and too liquid; there was a superfluous energy in her movements, a suggestion of distraction or even of madness not very securely held in check. But he was too susceptible to such suggestions. He was aware of that, and he warned himself not to be hasty. He looked at her again. Her face, once florid and dark, was softer, fuller, and more pale, a little yellow. He was able to picture her as she had once been when he glanced at his nephew. He resembled her strongly. Only his slightly outcurving nose belonged to the Leventhals.
“Now, tell me, what’s the matter, Elena?”
“Oh, Mickey is sick, he’s terribly sick,” said Elena.
“What’s he got?”
“The doctor says he doesn’t know what it is. He can’t do anything with him. He runs high fevers all the time. It started a couple of weeks ago. I give him to eat and he doesn’t keep it down. I try everything. I don’t know what I should do with him. And today I got such a scare. I went into the room and I couldn’t hear him breathe.”
“No, what do you mean?” said Leventhal.
“Just what I’m telling you. I couldn’t hear him breathe,” she said with intensity. “He wasn’t breathing. I put my head on the pillow by his. I couldn’t hear a thing. I put my hand over his nose. I couldn’t feel anything. I got cold all over. I thought I was going to die myself. I ran out to call the doctor. I couldn’t get him. I called his office and everywhere. I couldn’t find him. So then I called you. When I got back he was breathing. He was all right. Then I tried to phone you.”
Elena’s hand was resting on her bosom; the long, pointed fingers were dirty; beneath them her skin was white and very smooth.
So that was the crisis. He might have guessed it was something like that.
“He was breathing all the time,” he said somewhat roughly. “How could he stop and start again?”
“No, no,” she insisted. “He wasn’t.”
Leventhal’s composure was not perfect; it was tinged with fear. He thought, looking away from her toward a corner of the ceiling, “What superstition! Just like in the old country. The dead can come back to life, too, I suppose, and all the rest of it.”
“Why didn’t you feel his heart?” he said to her.
“I should have, probably…”
“You certainly should.”
“You were busy, weren’t you?”
“Well, sure, I had work---”
She expressed such contrition at this that he told himself to be kinder. He might as well be; he was here, the harm was done. He assured her that he had an afternoon coming. He had been with the firm six years, and if he couldn’t take a few hours off on a personal matter after six years, he might as well give up. He could go away every afternoon for a month without coming close to the number of hours of overtime without pay that he had put in. After he stopped talking his mind ran on in the same strain. In the civil service it was different. There you had your sick leave and you went home with a headache. And you had tenure.. But he did not want to dwell on this. He got up and turned his chair, as if to change the subject of his thoughts by changing his position.
“You should raise the shades,” he said to Elena. “Why do you keep them down?”
“It makes the room cooler.”
“It cuts off the air… And you have to keep the lamp on. That gives off heat.”
She had moved the clothing from his chair to the table, pushing back dishes, bread, milk cartons, magazines. He guessed that she kept the shades down for no other reason than to hide her slovenliness from the neighbors across the court. He looked at the room with displeasure. And Max drifted around from Norfolk to Galveston to God knows where. Perhaps he preferred living in rooming houses and hotels.
Elena gave Philip a dollar and sent him down for beer. She took the money from her dress pocket, which was filled with change. When he had gone, Leventhal asked to see Mickey.
He was lying in Elena’s hot, shadowy, close room, dozing in the large bed that stood against the wall, the sheet pulled down to his waist. His short black hair seemed damp; his mouth was open. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt. Leventhal carefully put the back of his hand to his cheek; it was burning. In withdrawing he knocked his ring against the bedpost. The look Elena shot him startled him. He found himself raising the same hand apologetically and felt his face flush. She, however, was no longer looking at him; she was drawing the sheet over the child’s shoulder. Leventhal withdrew to the hall and waited for her. She shut the door slowly, with such care that it seemed to him whole minutes passed. He gazed into the room; it grew darker about the figure on the bed partly hidden from him by the bulge of the chiffonier. At last she released the knob and they returned to the dining-room.
He sat down, depressed and gloomy. He began at once to argue that Mickey should be taken to a hospital. “Who is this doctor of yours?” he said. “What’s wrong with him that he lets you keep the boy at home? The hospital is the place for him.” But he soon realized that Elena, not the doctor, was to blame. She said, with great obstinacy, that he was better off at home, where she could take care of him herself. She showed such a dread of hospitals that at last he exclaimed, “Don’t be such a peasant, Elena!” She was silent, though she appeared more distressed than offended and probably did not understand him. He was annoyed with himself for being so vehement, but everything here oppressed him — the house, his sister-in-law, the sick child. How could the boy get well in such a place, in that room? “Well, for goodness sake, Elena,” he argued in a different tone, “a hospital is nothing to be afraid of.” She shut her eyes and shook her head; he began to shape another sentence but stopped and lay back in the mohair armchair.
Suddenly she said brightly, almost happily, “Here’s Philip and the beer.” She rose to bring glasses. There was a hunt for the bottle-opener; it was not found, and Philip pried off the caps on the handle of a metal cabinet in the kitchen. Elena wanted to make sandwiches, but Leventhal said he was not hungry. “Oh, it’ll be dinnertime soon. Your missis won’t like it if your appetite is spoiled. How is she? She’s such a pretty girl.” Elena smiled warmly. She did not even know his wife’s name. They had met only once or twice. He hesitated to tell her that Mary had gone South for a few weeks to be with her mother. Elena would have insisted that he stay.