Just Around the Corner. Fannie Hurst
"Where are we going, Adam dear?" she whispered.
"This is your night, Gertrude; give James your orders."
She snuggled deeper into the dark-red upholstery, and their hands clasped closer beneath the robe.
"James," she said, in a voice like a bell, "take us to the Vista for dinner; afterward motor out along the Palisade drive, far out so that we can see the Hudson by moonlight."
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OTHER PEOPLE'S SHOES
AT the close of a grilling summer that had sapped the life from the city as insidiously as fever runs through veins and licks them up—at the close of a day that had bleached the streets as dry as desert bones—Abe Ginsburg closed his store half an hour earlier than usual because his clerk, Miss Ruby Cohn, was enjoying a two days' vacation at the Long Island Recreation Farm, and because a staggering pain behind his eyes and zigzag down the back of his neck to his left shoulder-blade made the shelves of shoe-boxes appear as if they were wavering with the heat-dance of the atmosphere and ready to cast their neatly arranged stock in a hopeless fuddle on the center of the floor.
Up-stairs, on an exact level with the elevated trains that tore past the kitchen windows like speed monsters annihilating distance, Mrs. Ginsburg poised a pie-pan aloft on the tips of five fingers and waltzed a knife round the rim of the tin. A ragged ruffle of dough swung for a moment; she snipped it off, leaving the pie pat and sleek.
Then Mrs. Ginsburg smiled until a too perfect row of badly executed teeth showed their pink rubber gums, leaned over the delicate lid of the pie, and with a three-pronged fork pricked out the doughy inscription—Abe. Sarah baking cakes for Abraham's prophetic visitors had no more gracious zeal.
The waiting oven filled the kitchen with its gassy breath; a train hurtled by and rattled the chandeliers, a stack of plates on a shelf, and a blue-glass vase on the parlor mantel. A buzz-bell rang three staccato times. Mrs. Ginsburg placed the pie on the table-edge and hurried down a black aisle of hallway.
Book-agents, harbingers of a dozen-cabinet-photographs-colored-crayon-thrown-in, and their kin have all combined to make wary the gentle cliff-dweller. Mrs. Ginsburg opened her door just wide enough to insert a narrow pencil, placed the tip of her shoe in the aperture, and leaned her face against the jamb so that from without half an eye burned through the crack.
"Abie? It ain't you, is it, Abie?"
"Don't get excited, mamma!"
"It ain't six o'clock yet, Abie—something ain't right with you!"
"Don't get excited, mamma! I just closed early for the heat. For what should I keep open when a patent-leather shoe burns a hole in your hand?"
"Ach, such a scare as you give me! If I'd 'a' known it I could have had supper ready. It wouldn't hurt you to call up-stairs when you close early—no consideration that boy has got for his mother! Poor papa! If he so much as closed the store ten minutes earlier he used to call up for me to heat the things—no consideration that boy has got for his old mother!"
Mr. Ginsburg placed a heavy hand on each of his mother's shoulders and kissed her while the words were unfinished and smoking on her lips.
"It's too hot to eat, mamma. Ain't I asked you every night during this heat not to cook so much?"
"Just the same, when it comes to the table I see you eat. I never see you refuse nothing—I bet you come twice for apple-pie to-night. Is the hall table the place for your cuffs, Abie? I'm ashamed for the people the way my house looks when you're home—no order that boy has got! I go now and put my pie in the oven."
"I ain't hungry, mamma—honest! Don't fix no supper for me—I go in the front room and lay down for a while. Never have I known such heat as I had it in the store to-day—and with Miss Ruby gone it was bad enough, I can tell you."
Mrs. Ginsburg reached up suddenly and turned high a tiny bead of gas-light—it flared for a moment like a ragged-edged fan and then settled into a sooty flare. In its low-candle-power light their faces were far away and without outline—like shadows seen through the mirage of a dream.
"Abie—tell mamma—you ain't sick, are you? Abie, you look pale."
"Now, mamma, begin to worry about nothing when—"
"It ain't like you to come up early, heat or no heat. Ach! I should have known when he comes up-stairs early it means something. What hurts you, Abie? That's what I need yet, a sickness! What hurts you, Abie?"
"Mamma, the way you go on it's enough to make me sick if I ain't. Can't a boy come up-stairs just because—"
"I know you like a book; when you close the store and lay down before supper there's something wrong. Tell me, Abie—"
"All right, then! You know it so well I can't tell you nothing—all I got is a little tiredness from the heat."
"Go in and lay down. Can't you tell mamma what hurts you, Abie? Are you afraid it would give me a little pleasure if you tell me? No consideration that boy has got for his mother!"
"Honest, mamma, ain't I told you three times I ain't nothing but tired?"
"He snaps me up yet like he was a turtle and me his worst enemy! For what should I worry myself? For my part, I don't care. I only say, Abie, if there's anything hurts you—you know how poor papa started to complain just one night like this how he fussed at me when I wanted the doctor. If there's anything hurts you—"
"There ain't, mamma."
"Come in and let me fix the sofa for you. I only say when you close the store early there's something wrong. That Miss Ruby should go off yet—vacation she has to have—a girl like that, with her satin shoes and all—comes into the store at nine o'clock 'cause she runs to the picture shows all night! Yetta Washeim seen her. Vacation yet she has to have! Twenty years I spent with poor papa in the store, and no vacation did I have. Lay down, Abie."
"All right, then," said Mr. Ginsburg, as if duty were a geological eon, and throwing himself across the flowered velvet lounge in the parlor. "I'll lay down if it suits you better."
Mr. Ginsburg was of a cut that never appears on a classy clothes advertisement or in the silver frame on the bird's-eye maple dressing-table of sweet sixteen or more; he belonged to the less ornamented but not unimportant stratum that manufactures the classy clothes by the hundred thousand, and eventually develops into husbands and sponsors for full-length double-breasted sealskin coats for the sweet sixteens and more.
He was as tall as Napoleon, with a round, un-Napoleonic head, close-shaved so that his short-nap hair grew tight like moss on a rock, and a beard that defied every hirsute precaution by pricking darkly through the lower half of his face as phenomenally as the first grass-blades of spring push out in an hour.
"Let me fix you a little something, Abie. I got grand broth in the ice-box—all I need to do is to heat it."
"Ain't I told you I ain't hungry, mamma?"
"When that boy don't eat he's sick. I should worry yet! Poor papa! If he'd listened to me he'd be living to-day. I'm your worst enemy—I am! I work against my own child—that's the thanks what I get."
Sappho, who never wore a gingham wrapper and whose throat was unwrinkled and full of music, never sang more surely than did Mrs. Ginsburg into the heart-cells of her son. He reached out for her wrapper and drew her to him.
"Aw, mamma, you know I don't mean nothing; just when you get all worried over nothing it makes me mad. Come, sit down by me."
"To-night we don't go up to Washeims'. I care a lot for Yetta's talk—her Beulah this and her Beulah that! It makes me sick!"
"I'll take