“You filthy . . .” she was trembling. “My sainted mother never . . .”

  “No. She found you in a head of cabbage.”

  “Little pitchers,” warned Flo, indicating the child standing in the corner.

  “She has to find out things some way,” mumbled Henny. But he was ashamed of what he had said.

  “She hears enough dirt on the streets. Does she have to hear it in her own home, too?”

  “You call this a home?”

  “Is it my fault? I try to make it a home. I work my fingers to the . . .”

  “. . . Bone,” he broke in.

  “And nights I have to sit and look . . .”

  “. . . at the four walls,” he quoted wearily.

  They spoke faster and more furiously, each jumping in to take the other’s lines. It was like a stale play where each actor had his part letter perfect and could play the other’s part, too.

  Soon their words meant nothing. The furious tones carried all the meaning. Margy trembled with fright in her corner. She wanted to hide but was afraid to call attention to herself by stepping out of the corner.

  Finally the neighbors, who had first listened eagerly, then became bored at the trite dialogue, took a hand. The people upstairs stamped on the floor for quiet. The people downstairs banged on their ceiling with a broom handle. People on Grand Street shouted at them across two yards.

  “Shut up!”

  “Shut your windows or shut your traps!”

  A boy flying pigeons on an adjoining roof threw himself flat on his stomach and leaned over the roof’s edge. Inspired, doubtless by his close association with birds, he shouted to the fighting Shannons to lay an egg.

  Henny stuck his head out of the window and shouted at all of the hecklers: “Go to hell. Go to hell, all of youse!” But there were tears in his voice. He closed the window, shutting out the warm, murmurous, summer night.

  There was silence in the kitchen of the flat. Flo sat with a spent look on her face. The room was growing dark but she did not think to light the gas.

  After a while she got up and carried his supper dishes to the sink. Then the aftermath of the quarrel, with both ashamed, set in.

  He spoke with quiet despair. “What’s happened to us, Flo?”

  It’s not my fault, she started to say. Instead she pulled in her lower lip between her teeth. She would say nothing more. She was spent with quarreling and relieved that it was over. He went on as if explaining something to himself.

  “I was a boy living in a rear house on Scholes Street. My folks,” he went on, “were greenhorns from the old country. So they got shoved around. To get even, they shoved me around. I use’ to hang out around the Jews’ pushcarts on Moore Street closing time. Other kids swiped stuff off of them just because they was Jews. But me, I worked for them. I helped them carry their stuff in nights. They paid me off with fruit and vegetables that wouldn’t hold overnight. My folks needed that food.

  “My folks! My mother did the best she could. My father,” his voice tightened with bitterness, “rest his soul, he didn’t know no better and I won’t hold nothing against a dead man.

  “Yes, I was a boy living in a rear house on Scholes Street. Bigger kids beat me up. And when I came home crying, my old man walloped me for letting myself get beat up. That was to learn me to be tough, he said. But I didn’t want to learn to be tough. I didn’t have it in me.

  “I had the ideas all boys has. I was dope enough to think I stood a chance a being president of the United States. They fooled us in school. They learned us that every American boy stood a chance a being president. I believed that like I use’ to believe in Sanny Claus. Well, I got over that when I got in long pants.

  “Then I got this here idea that I could be a cop or a fireman or the guy what drives a railroad train. A free country. Anything could happen. Well, ideas was free anyways. It turned out I didn’t have no chance to be nothing.

  “I was pushed out when I was thirteen. Get a job, my old man said. Get any kind a job just so it brings in a few dollars a week. And I been working ever since—not what I want to work at but anything I can get.

  “I’m stuck! And I’m stuck till I die.

  “But I didn’t start out stuck. No. When I started keeping company with you, Flo, I thought you was the prettiest girl in Williamsburg. We bought furniture on time from Fehmel’s. You had that bedspread you crocheted when we was engaged. Everything in our house will be the best, you said. I said, a flat on Maujer Street’s the best I can do right now. You said, it’s only for now, Henny, we’ll live in a better place someday. I’ll help you. It takes time, you said. You got to crawl before you can walk, you said.

  “Six years ago! Furniture ain’t paid up yet. Bedspread’s been in hock all these years. It’s only for now, you said, then. It’s only for now, we say when we’re young. And one fine day we wake up and find out that what’s only for now is the whole Goddamned thing!

  “Still and all, I had my ideas. I use’ to think you was the prettiest girl in Williamsburg.”

  They were silent for a long time. He sat with his thoughts. She sat within arm’s reach of him and her hand quivered with the impulse to put it on his cheek in a gesture of love. She remembered the shy way he had said, “I’d like you to be my girl,” the first time they had ever danced together. Remembering, some of the old tenderness came back to her. She had a flash of understanding him; the dreams he had had—his fundamental decency that made it so hard for him to cope with harsh living.

  She knew she had it in her woman’s power to give him hope and dreams again. All she’d have to say was: Never mind, Henny. I love you. We still have each other. And all this is temporary. Everything will be better someday. Wait and see.

  She could say that. That’s all he wanted to hear. He’d be happy all of a sudden. He’d put his arms around her. . . .

  In a panic, she murdered her tender thoughts. She fought down the impulse to show him affection. She knew what any demonstrativeness would lead to. Another terrifying nine months—new stitches—another mouth to feed.

  Her eyes sought her child in the darkened room. Margy was sitting under the washtubs playing with two shoe boxes and some clothespins. She put all the clothespins in one box, then took them out and put them in the other box.

  She should have a doll, Flo thought. Every little girl should have a doll. I never had one. I use’ to say that if ever I had a little girl I’d see to it that she had a doll. She ought to have a doll.

  Her husband spoke, joining his voice to her thoughts. “We use’ to say that if we had kids we wanted them to have it better than we had it. So what do we go and do? We shove our kid around the way we got shoved around. We don’t learn nothing. That’s the trouble. That’s why we’re stuck. We don’t learn nothing from what we went through.”

  He got up and paced the small kitchen. “Did I ask to be born? Did I ask to be a millionaire? No. All I asked for was a fair chance. I tried to be a good boy; a halfway decent man. But do I stand a chance? Will our kid ever stand a chance?

  “Questions. Always questions and no answers. Who’s got them answers and where are they keeping them?”

  He put his hat and coat on.

  “And now, where are you going?” asked Flo.

  “Down to the corner.”

  “You won’t find no answers in a saloon.”

  “I know. But at leas’ I’ll find other guys there with the same questions.”

  He closed the door gently as he went out.

  Flo sat in the dark and thought: I mustn’t let him get talking that way again. It makes me remember the real truth about my mother and I don’t want to remember the real truth. I want it to be the way I made it up—that she was a saint. If I had to keep remembering all the time how bad things was at home, I couldn’t live. It’s better to remember things the way they shoulda been insteada the way they was. I got so that I don’t hardly remember the way they was and that’s a very good thing.

  She called her child by name and Margy turned her face toward her. The white face and fair hair made a pale blur in the shadows.

  “Come over here, Margy.” But the child turned her face away. “Aw, come, baby, and after a while I’ll light the light and read you the funny sheets. Come to Mama.”

  The child came to her mother. Flo lifted her to her lap. “Listen, baby. Mama didn’t mean to slap you so hard today when you got lost. The hitting didn’t mean nothing. It’s just a way some mamas has. Just remember that you are always your mama’s little girl.”

  Somehow the child understood that she could cry now and her mother wouldn’t punish her for doing so. The child broke then. She folded her arms tightly about her mother’s neck and whispered, “I was losted all day.”

  The tears came.

  The mother sat holding the child tightly. She pressed her face to the child’s wet cheek. She cried, too.

  And they were two children who cried because it was dark and they were lost.

  3

  MARGY GREW UP learning to accept things as they were. She learned to make the best of things. She was grateful for little concessions and considered herself lucky when things went her way. She had her few moments of bitterness and rebellion when she thought that things ought to be better; that her parents should have more understanding and proceed on the premise that she was not a bad girl when she misbehaved or was disobedient; but that she was merely thoughtless and stupid when she did things that angered her mother.

  In thoughtful moments she grieved at the continuous antagonism between her father and mother. But most of the time she figured her parents’ way of life was the way of all life; the way that folks lived along together.

  She knew always the pinch of poverty but seldom the stranglehold of actual want. She endured the tight, nervous discipline of her home, knowing the compensating freedom of her school life. (At least school seemed free in comparison with home.)

  So at seventeen, with two years of high school behind her, she felt ready to lick the world. She had the optimism of the young to whom all of life shines endlessly ahead; the young who are sure they can make their own proud destiny in spite of the tritely spoken wisdom of the older people who have had their chance at licking life and have come out of the unequal fight with bloody and bowed souls.

  When Margy set out to find her first job, her father made a little speech. He spoke out of his own experience and told her that the two most heartbreaking chores of life were looking for a new flat and for a new job. He said that nothing beat you down like being dispossessed or having to give up living quarters because you couldn’t pay an unexpected or arbitrary rent increase, and then going out to walk the streets to find another flat within your means. Maybe you found it, only to be turned down because the landlord didn’t think your job was good enough to guarantee the rent. Or you were turned down because you had committed the economic crime of having children. Not, explained Henny in all fairness, that you could blame the landlord. Kids did wreck a place.

  It was the same with looking for a job. If you had never worked before, you were tagged “inexperienced” and few bosses wanted to bother about breaking in a new hand. If you had worked before, the question hardest to answer was: Why had you left your last job? If you had been fired, you had no proper references, and bosses were leery of hiring you. If you had left of your own accord, you were considered a troublemaker or a sorehead; a dissatisfied worker. And what boss wanted such a man in his shop?

  That’s why, Henny explained, he had clung to the job he hated. He knew the odds were against his finding a better one. And that’s why, he told Margy, she shouldn’t get the idea that looking for a new job was all pie.

  Margy listened but she didn’t believe a word he said. She had finished her formal education the last Friday in June and was all for going out the next day and starting to work. Her parents urged her to wait a little while; she’d have to work long enough in her time; that the transition from schooldays to workdays should be made slowly. Margy gave in to them. She made the transition slowly. She didn’t start looking for a job until the following Monday, three days later.

  She set forth equipped with a neatly clipped HELP WANTED FEMALE column from the Sunday classified ad section of the newspaper, and two letters—one from her high-school principal saying she was intelligent and industrious and one from her parish priest saying she was intelligent and decent. The priest’s letter was more important than the principal’s. It proved definitely that she was a Gentile. It eliminated her having to clear the hurdle of intolerance.

  She tried the Manhattan ads first because she wanted to work in New York. She thought of it as a glamorous place. She dreamed of a new world; of the daily ride to and from Brooklyn over the Williamsburg Bridge which spanned the East River, the River she had read about in her history course in high school.

  She had another foolish, sentimental dream. It was about getting paid on Saturday in New York, and buying a box of Loft’s Special Candy out of her pay and bringing it home to her mother. She dramatized her mother’s pleasure; how Flo would wait each Saturday for the weekly treat. And some weeks the treat would be “parleys” which were very wonderful, indeed.

  These warm dreams got a thorough douche of icy water after she had replied to two ads. The two jobs she had tried first had been filled hours before she arrived. The man at the second place explained that thousands of boys and girls who had participated at hundreds of high-school graduation exercises over the last week end were loose in New York—avid for jobs; any kind of jobs. He went out of his way to tell her this because he had a daughter who had just graduated from Girls’ High in Brooklyn and he knew how it was.

  The third ad marked on her list said: General Clerical Worker Wanted. It was a small office consisting of one hard-looking woman, a desk, chair and typewriter. The woman asked Margy could she take dictation directly on a typewriter. Margy looked blank. Thereupon the woman said that she dictated very slowly and motioned Margy to sit down to the machine. Margy said she guessed she could type from dictation. Of course she didn’t know how to type but it looked easy. You merely hit the letters to spell out words, she thought. The woman gave her a sheet of paper, then lit a cigarette while waiting for Margy to get set. Much to Margy’s embarrassment, she couldn’t put the paper in the typewriter. She tried and tried but the gadgets about the roller confused her. The woman watched her a moment half sneeringly, half pityingly. Then she spoke. She spoke in a tired, tough voice.

  “You put up a good bluff, sister, and I love a gal what puts up a good bluff. But you couldn’t follow through. You just couldn’t follow through. I need somebody I can count on and you looked like that somebody—a little dumb but honest. But you don’t make the grade. Let me give you a tip, sister. Forget about working for a living. Glaum on to some guy who’ll marry you and support you. Have a couple of kids and forget the business world. And now,” the woman said, bored and tired, “beat it!”

  Margy backed out of the place. In a way she was glad she hadn’t been hired. Yet she would have liked to work there a while just to see what the business was. There had been a half-written letter on the typewriter desk. The heading said: Mail Service. Daily Tip. Then the letter started out: Why throw good money after bad? Widow of famous jockey, having important connections . . . That’s all she had been able to read.

  Margy had a nickel left out of the half-dollar her mother had given her. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. No use answering any more ads. Everyone would know she was a failure—had spent the whole morning in a fruitless search for work. Else why would she still be looking in late afternoon?

  When she got home and made her report, Flo was full of I-told-you-so’s. “I told you not to go to New York,” said Flo. “I told you you’d stand a better chance in Brooklyn. I told you it was silly to go so far away from home to work. I told you that there’s everything in Brooklyn that you could ever find or see in New York. But did you listen? No! So now you found out your mother was right.”

  Flo was one of those loyal Brooklynites whose fighting loyalty to her birthplace had been inherited from her parents. They and their neighbors had seriously considered setting up cannon and ramparts to fight a civil war for Brooklyn’s liberty back in the old days when Brooklyn, a great American city in its own right, was absorbed by census-hungry New York City and demoted to “borough.”

  Margy had no antagonism toward Manhattan. But like her mother, she considered it a separate city and she looked upon it as any outsider would: a distant, unknown, glamorous place. She sure would have liked to work there.

  Well, she had tried to get a job there and failed. Now she thought of Brooklyn fondly. She worked up a feeling of honesty, uprightness and civic pride and decided that Brooklyn was the only place to work in. She left for her second day’s hunt for a job with a clipping from the Standard Union, Brooklyn’s own paper, in her purse. The ad stated that the mail-order firm of Thomson-Jonson wanted mail readers, no experience required, but willing to learn.

  The Thomson-Jonson Mail Order House had its warehouses and offices in downtown Brooklyn. Margy was to learn later that it was a small concern catering to small farm owners in Long Island and New Jersey.

  A trolley could take her to within a block of it. She got off at the wrong stop on purpose so that she could detour by way of Fulton Street and walk to the place where the wonderful big department stores were. She wanted to look at the windows of the stores. She walked as slowly as dared a job-hunting citizen, and thoroughly enjoyed the hats and dresses exhibited behind the big plate-glass windows. She stopped a long time before Abraham & Straus’s window admiring an Empress Eugenia hat. Then she turned into a narrow side street on her way to Thomson-Jonson’s.

  She was about to pass a tiny flower shop with most of its stock exhibited on the narrow strip of sidewalk before the store when a sign in the window stopped her. GIRL WANTED, it said, and for the moment, Margy forgot about the mail-order house. Margy thought how wonderful it would be to work in a flower store; to handle beautiful flowers all day long; pick them out for customers—to receive the compliment: “I leave the order in your hands”; to arrange the order artistically and wrap the flowers up in that soft, shiny, green paper. And as she stood staring at the sign, she began to dream. Maybe on a Saturday the man would let her take home some roses almost full bloom, that wouldn’t keep over Sunday. How wonderful to take home a bunch of flowers to her mother each Saturday! That would be almost as good as Loft’s Special.