Five Flights Up
{Continued from page 2) "I don't see why you shouldn't lways buy your clothes," she Commented. "A woman with a man like yours with a heart of gold, she ought to come out
shopping often. And go out with him. Yes, I got a ready-made serge that will fit you grand�grand, I tell you. The biggest size in the store. But why did you let yourself get so fat? I remember when you
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came here�a figure like a regular flapper."
Birdie didn't know what a flapper was, but she felt she was being criticized. And didn't like it.
"A married woman with two babies has a right to get fat," she encountered.
But the proprietor, pulling and mauling the serge into shape across Birdie's already stooping shoulders, was ready with her answer. "Not in America!" she insisted. "A married woman's got to be a regular chicken or else her husband gets sick of her. I know what I'm talking about. My sister's daughter had the grandest husband in the old country�a man of gold.. And what did he do? Tell me what he did! As soon as he brought her to America he started saying she was a 'greener' and a back-number and he run off with a shicksa, a shicksa with short skirts�it was a shame for the neighbours for. That's what my sister's daughter got in America. And do you want to look at something else! But if you listen to me, this dress fits you like it was made-to-order."
"How much?" asked Birdie dully. But her mind was no longer on her new finery. She felt she had wakened too late. Raphael had tired of her; perhaps there was already a short-skirted shicksa in his life. Only that morning when, rejuvenated by her memories of spring, she had called him a loving pet-name from the old day, he had answered her roughly. She had lost her husband in America!
But now that she was down in the dreaded streets she doggedly completed her shopping: chicken, dried fruits, wine, mat-zos. Her arms ached now as well as her heart as she mounted the five flights that led up to her home. Her home! Once it had been her home, her kingdom. Cramped as it was, a place of exile from the memory-sweetened village of her birth, now she felt it crashing down upon her head. What would she do if Raphael left her!
All that day she worked in dumb pain in her shining, clean kitchen. She bathed the children�rather a thankless task since Jacob was so fond of the coal scuttle�and dressed them in their Pesach clothes. Made a hasty attempt at brushing her long, neglected hair, twisting it into a heavy knot; slipped on the blue serge which for all its newness could not make her look slim and beautiful in the cracked dresser mirror. At last all was complete, the table set, the cup for Elijah (it had been her mother's) standing beside the covered matzoh, the tray in
�ft
wtfe h aroze th and Jaws ley and dials of salted ^ water She .was not an imaginative woman but to-night she realized the symbolism of the salt water: she felt that this Pesach might be a feast eaten with tears.
She heard Raphael stumbling up the stairs; he no longer ran like a boy. He entered, sullen as he had been so often lately, wondering perhaps if in her late indolence she had arranged properly for the ancient feast nigh: of Israel. His tired eyes took in the table, her most cherished cloth, the matzoh and the wine: they strayed to the baby in her high chair, lovely in a clean white dress with blue ribbons, to little Jacob, equally beautiful to his paternal eye although his new suit was at least two sizes t( o large for him. Last he looked toward his wife, his wife who stood at the stove, pretending to sniff at the chicken, his uife in her serge dress, her hair twisted in the great knot at her neck, just as she had worn it in those old days in their home beyond the seas.
Raphael remembered with a stab of painful joy how proud she had been of her long hair, how she had asked him fearfully whether he would wish it cut when she passed beneath the chuppah. And he had answered her with a kiss, determined to shock his pious parents by ex-Dousing an unshorn bride, ft was not so very long that she had been a bride, he told himself, but how tired he had allowed her to become with the housework the care of the children! Only that morning when a loving word might have sweetened t;e day for her, he had turru-d roughly away from her tin i endearments.
A sudden resolve seized Rap. -ael. He went to the sto\e. seized his wife by her shoulde -Now he knew why she had not turned, for her face was wet with tears.
He kissed them away to e naive astonishment of the ha: y little Jacob was too busy joying a filched prune to c< ment on the unusual friend!i: of his father.
"Birdie," cried Raphael. -eyes sparkling boyishly as t: i-\ took in his first Seder table a America, "Birdie, if you liki or not, I'm going to take in your new dress to the mo\ And I'll teach you English s the writing on the pictures N got to start coming out with right along. Do you hear?"
Birdie heard. Suddenly u realized why they lived flights up, right under the Because at that moment seemed so very near heaven.