Call It Sleep (57 page)

“No! No! Not at all!”

“Good-night then, good-night.” Hastily. “May God bestow you an appetite for supper. I shan't trouble you again. If you wish I'll start him on Chumish soon—a rare thing for one who has spent so little time in a cheder. Good-night to you all.”

“Good-night!”

“Hi-yi-yi-yi-yi-! Life is a blind cast. A blind caper in the dark. Good-night! Hi-i! Yi! Yi! Evil day!”

The latch ground. The door opened, creaked, closed on his hi-yi-ing footsteps. And of the silence that followed the beating of her heart condensed the anguish into intervals. And then his father's voice, vibrant with contempt—

“The old fool! The blind old nag! But this once he wrought better than he knew!”

He felt his mother's thighs and shoulders stiffen. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“I'll tell you in a moment,” he answered ominously. “No, on second thought I won't need to tell you at all. It will tell itself. Answer me this: Where was my father when I married you?”

“Do you need ask me? You know that yourself—he was dead.”

“Yes, I know it,” was his significant retort. And his voice tightening suspiciously. “You saw my mother?”

“Of course! What's come over you, Albert?”

“Of course!” he repeated in slow contempt. “Why do you smirk at me with that blank, befuddled look? I mean did you see her before I brought her to you myself?”

“What is it you want, Albert?”

“An answer without guile,” he snapped. “You know what I'm talking about! I know you too well. Did she come to you alone? In secret? Well? I'm waiting!”

As though her body were compelled to follow the waverings of an immense irresolution, she swayed back and forth, and David with her. And at last quietly: “If you must know—she did.”

“Ha!” The table slid suddenly along the floor. “I knew it! Oh, I know her nature! And she told you, didn't she? And she warned you! Of me! Of what I had done?”

“There was nothing said of that—!”

“Nothing? Nothing of what? How can you be so simple?”

“Nothing!” she repeated desperately. “Stop tormenting me, Albert!”

“You wouldn't have said nothing.” He pursued her relentlessly. “You would have asked me, what? What I had done? She told you!”

His mother was silent.

“She told you! Is your tongue trapped in silence? Speak!”

“Ach—!” and stopped. Only David heard the wild beating of her heart. “Not now! Not with him here!”

“Now!” he snarled.

“She did.” Her voice was wrung from her. “And she told me I ought not to marry you. But what difference—”

“She did! And the rest? The others? Who else!”

“Why are you so eager to hear?”

“Who else?”

“Father and mother. Bertha.” Her voice had become labored. “The others know. I never told you because I—”

“They knew!” he interrupted her with bitter triumph. “They knew all the time! Then why did they let you marry me? Why did
you
marry me?”

“Why? Because no one believed her. Who could?”

“Oh!” sarcastically. “Is that it? That was quickly thought of! It was easy to shut your minds. But she swore it was true, didn't she? She must have, hating me afterwards as she did. Didn't she tell you that my father and I had quarreled that morning, that he struck me, and I vowed I would repay him? There was a peasant watching us from afar. Didn't she tell you that? He said I could have prevented it. I could have seized the stick when the bull wrenched it from my father's hand. When he lay on the ground in the pen. But I never lifted a finger! I let him be gored! Didn't she tell you that?”

“Yes! But, Albert, Albert! She was like a woman gone mad! I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now! Let's stop now, please! Can't we talk about it later?”

“Now that it's all become clear to me you want to stop, is that it?”

“And why is it suddenly so clear?” her tone held a sharp insistence. “What is so clear to you? What are you trying to prove?”

“You ask me?” ominously. “You dare ask me?”

“I do! What do you mean?”

“Oh, the gall of your kind! How long do you think you'll hide it! Will I be lulled and gulled forever? Must I tell you? Must I blurt it out! My sin balances another? Is that enough for you?”

“Albert!” her stunned outcry.

“Don't call to me!” he snarled. “I'll say it again—they had to get rid of you!”

“Albert!”

“Albert!” He spat back at her. “Whose is he? The one you're holding in your arms! Ha? How should he be named?”

“You're mad! Dear God! What's happened to you?”

“Mad, eh? Mad then, but not a cheat! Come! What are you waiting for? Unmask yourself! I've been unmasked to you for years. All these years you said nothing. You pretended to know nothing. Why? You knew why! I would have asked you what I've just asked you now! I would have said why did they let you marry me. There must have been something wrong. I would have known! I would have told you. But now, speak! Speak out with a great voice! Why fear? You know who I am! That red cow betrayed you, didn't she? I'll settle with her too. But don't think there was no stir in this silence. All these years my blood told me! Whispered to me whenever I looked at him, nudged me, told me he wasn't mine! From the very moment I saw him in your arms out of the ship, I guessed. I guessed!”

“And you believe a child's fantasy?” She spoke with a fixed flat voice of one staggered by the incredible. “The babbling? The wandering of a child?”

“No! No!” he bit back with a fierce sarcasm. “Not a bit of it. Not a word. How could I? It's muddled of course. But did you want a commentary. Let him speak again. It might be clearer.”

“I've thought you strange, Albert, and even mad, but that was pride and that made you pitiful. But now I see you're quite, quite mad! Albert!” She suddenly cried out as if her cry would waken him. “Albert! Do you know what you're saying!”

“A comedienne to the end.” He paused, drew in the sharp breath of one marveling—“Hmph! How you sustain it! Not a tremor! Not a sign of betrayal! But answer me this!” His voice thinned to a probe. “Here! Here's a chance to show me my madness. Where is his birth certificate? Ha? Where is it? Why have they never sent it?”

“That? Was it because of that one single thing your blood warned you so much? Why, dear God, they wrote you—my own father did. They had looked for it everywhere and never found it—lost! The confusion of departure! What other reason could there be?”

“Yes! Yes! What else could it be? But we—we know why it stayed lost, don't we? It was better unfound! After all, was I there to see him born? Was I even there to see you bearing him? No! I was in America—on their money, notice! The ticket they bought me. Why were they so eager to get rid of me? Why such haste, and I not married more than a month?”

“Why? Can't you see for yourself? There were nine in my family. Servants, others, outsiders began to know. They had hoped I would follow you soon. There was no money at home. The store was failing. The sons weren't grown yet. You couldn't send for me—”

“Oh, stop! Stop! I know all that! Who is it they began to know of—you or me?”

“Do you still persist? Of you, of course! Your mother went around telling everyone.”

“And they were ashamed, eh? I see! But now I'll tell you my version. Here I am in America sweating for your passport, starving myself. You see? Thousands of miles away. Alone. Never writing to anyone only to you. Now! He's born a month or two too soon to be mine—perhaps more. You wait that time. That month or two, and then, why then exactly on the head of the hour you write me—I have a son! A joy! Fortune! I have a son. Ha! But when you came across, the doctors were too knowing. Fool your husband, they said. You were frightened. Seventeen months were too few for one so grown. Twenty-one then! Twenty-one they might believe, and twenty-one of course I thought he was. There you are! Wasn't that it? I haven't forgotten. My memory's good. An organist, eh? A goy, God help you! Ah! It's clear! But my blood! My blood I say warned me!”

“You're mad! There's no other word!”

“So? But good enough for your kind. That's what they reasoned back home—the old, praying glutton and his wife—Did you know an organist? Well, why don't you answer?”

“I—oh, Albert, let me alone!” She moved David about frantically under her arms. “Let me alone in God's name! You've heaped enough shame on me for nothing. It's more than I can bear. You're distraught! Let's not talk about it anymore! Later! Tomorrow! I've suffered twice for this now.”

“Twice! Ha!” He laughed. “You've a gift for blurting things out! Then you knew an organist?”

“You claim I did!” Her voice went suddenly stony.

“Did you? Say it.”

“I did then. But that was—”

“You did! You did!” His words rang out again. “It fits! It matches! Why look! Look up there! Look! The green corn—taller than a man! It struck your fancy, didn't it? Why, of course it would! The dense corn high above your heads, eh? The summer trysts! But I—I married in November! Ha! Ha!—Sh! Don't speak! Not a word! You'll be ludicrous, you're so confounded!”

“And you believe? And you believe? This that you're saying! Can you believe it?”

“Anhr! Do I believe the sun? Why I've sensed it for years I tell you! I've stubbed my feet against it at every turn and tread. It's been in my way, tangled me! And do you know how? Haven't you ever seen it? Then why do weeks and weeks go by and I'm no man at all? No man as other men are? You know of what I speak! You ought to, having known others! I've been poisoned by a guess! Corruption has haunted me. I've sensed it! I've known it! Do you understand? And it's been true!”

She rose. And David still in her arms, still clasping her neck, dared not breathe nor whimper in his terror, dared not lift his eyes from the shelter of her breast. And his father's voice, nearer now, broke like a rod of stiff, metallic words across his back.

“Hold him tightly! He's yours!”

She answered, a kind of cold deliberate pity in her voice. “And now, now that you know what you think you know, the corruption's drained. Is that how you are? The fog is split. Why didn't you tell me sooner what clouded you? I would have freed you sooner.”

“And now like any discovered cheat you'll mock me, eh?”

“I'm not mocking you, Albert. I'm just asking you to tell me exactly what it is you want.”

“I want,” his teeth ground into his words. “Never to see that brat again.”

She sucked in her breath as if making a last attempt. “You're driving me mad, Albert! He's your son. Your son! Oh, God! He's yours. What if I knew another man long before I met you—! It was long ago, I swear to you! Can he, must he be his? He's yours!”

“I'll never believe you! Never! Never!”

“Why then I'll go!”

“Go. I'll caper! I'll dance on the roofs! I'll be rid of it! Be rid of it, I tell you! The nights in the milk wagon! The thoughts! The torment! The stables—hitching the horse. The other men! The torment! I'll be rid of it! His—”

But as though answering his suppressed scream of exultation, noises in the hallway, wrangling, angry, confused, battered like turbulent waves against the door. He stopped as though stuck. About David's legs the clasp of his mother's arms tightened protectingly. Again the cries threatening, reproachful and a stamp and shuffling of feet. A sharp crack at the door—flung open, it banged against a chair.

“Now let me go! I'm here! I'm going to speak!”

He knew the voice! One wild glance he threw over his shoulder—Aunt Bertha grappling with her husband seemed less strange to him now that the light of the kitchen had grown so grey. With a whimper of despair, he clutched at his mother's neck, buried his face frenziedly into the crook of her throat. And she, bewildered—

“Nathan! You? Bertha! What is it? You look so frantic!”

“I—I am angry!” Uncle Nathan gasped tormentedly. “I have much—!”

“It's nothing!” Aunt Bertha beat his words down. “My man is a fool! Look at him! He's gone crazy!”

“Let me speak! Will you let me speak!”

“Be strangled first!” She flew at him venomously. “He wants—do you know what he wants? Can't you guess? What does a Jew want? Money. He's come to borrow money! And why does he want money? To make a bigger store. Nothing else! He's out of his head! I'll tell you what happened to him. He dreamt last night the police came and stripped off his boots, the way they did his bankrupt grandfather in Vilna. It's gone to his head. He's frightened. His wits are in a foam. Ask him where he is now. He couldn't answer you. I'm sure he couldn't. And how are you, Albert! It's a fair brace of months since I have seen you! You ought to visit us sometimes, see our little store, and vast variety of bon-bons. Cheh! Cheh! Und heva suddeh-wawdeh!”

David's father made no answer.

And lightly as though she expected none. “And why are you holding him in your arms, Genya?”

“Just to—just to feel his weight,” his mother replied unsteadily. “And he is heavy!” She bent over to put him down.

“No, Mama!” he whispered, clinging to her. “No, Mama!”

“Only a moment, beloved! I can't hold you in my arms so long. You're too heavy!” She set him on his feet. “There! Once he gets up, he won't come down.” And still keeping her trembling hand on his shoulder, she turned to Nathan. “Money? Why—?” She laughed confusedly. “I think the world's gone mad! What makes you come to us of all people? Are you in your right senses, Nathan?”

Fixing his glowering, harassed eyes on David, Nathan opened his mouth to speak—