Call It Sleep (19 page)

In a few seconds, he did, and David knew by the very way the door swung open that his father was irritated. He came in—alone. The muscles under the dark jaws were bumpy, distinct, like cords twisted about and bulging. His eyes held a steady glower.

“Albert.” She smiled.

He made no answer, but breathing gustily, stripped off his coat—the jacket beneath always peeled with it—and removed his hat and handed them to her.

“I hope you haven't prepared too much supper,” he began brusquely as he whipped his tie and collar off. “He wouldn't come. Do you hear?” She had gone into David's bedroom to hang up his coat.

“Yes.” Her voice preceded her. “I can use what's left over. There's no loss—especially in the winter—nothing spoils.”

“Hm!” He turned his back to her, rolled up his sleeves and bent over the sink. “And don't prepare anything extra for him to-morrow. He's not coming then either.” The squeezed soap slipped clacking into the sink. His teeth ground as he picked it up.

“No?” Her eyes, resting on his bent back opened in a worried flicker; her face sagged. But the next moment her voice was as barely surprised as a voice dared be and yet be non-committal. “What's the matter?”

“Would I had known as little of him as I know his reasons!” He slapped his dripping palms angrily against his lean neck. “He wouldn't say anything! He wouldn't even ride home with me—had to go somewhere—some lame excuse! And that marriage-broker affair! Not a word! As though it had never been! As though he had never spoken about it! He took the keys from me in the morning, checked my overtime, and that was all!” He shut the water off with a wrathful jerk, snatched the towel. “God knows what he's found or done or achieved! It's too much for me! But why, tell me?” The towel paused in its swirling. “Do you think that if he found a woman who thought he was agreeable and had—she, I mean—a great deal of money, do you think that that might have given him a wry neck?”

A faint, troubled groan ushered in her answer. “I don't know, Albert.”

“Now be honest!” He suddenly swung the towel into a ball, glared and thrust his lips out. “Answer me with a brunt!”

“What is it, Albert?” She lifted startled, fending hands. “What is it?”

Seeing her alarm, David squirmed back into his chair and watched them apprehensively under the rims of lowered eyes.

“I—” his father broke off, bit his lip. “Was anything said by—by me? Did I seem to be mocking him—when was it?—Friday night? When I told you he was going to a marriage broker?”

“Why, no, Albert!” Her body seemed to slacken. “No! Not at all! You said nothing that would offend any one! I thought he was amused!”

“You're sure? You're sure he didn't leave so early because I—because of some jest I made?”

“No. You said nothing out of the way.”

“Unh! I thought I hadn't! Well, what fiend is it that eggs him on then? He was like a man with a secret grudge. He wouldn't speak! He wouldn't look at me straight. A man I've known for months! A man who's been here night after night!” He pulled a chair toward him, slumped into it. “At noon today, he ate his lunch with that Paul Zeeman. He knows I hate the man. He did that to hurt me. I know!”

“But—don't—don't let that upset you, Albert. I mean, don't take offense at that! It's—why—” She laughed nervously—“It's too much like a school-girl's device—this—this eating with another.”

“Is it?” he asked sarcastically. “Much you know about it! You haven't seen him all day. It wasn't only that! There were other things! I tell you there's something seething in that skull of his! A hatred, for some mad reason! A vengeance biding its time! Do you know?” He suddenly drew back, looked up at her with narrowed, suspicious eyes. “You don't seem dismayed—you don't seem downcast enough!”

“Why, Albert!” She flinched before his harsh scrutiny. “I
am
dismayed! I
am
downcast. But what can I do? My only hope is that this—this hostility—or what one may call it—is—is only temporary! What can it be? For a time perhaps! Something worrying him that he won't disclose! Why, it may be all over by to-morrow!”

“Yes. It may indeed! Something may! But my belief is that no man would become a stranger to me overnight unless he thought I had wronged him. Isn't that so? And he—he's worse than a stranger—he's a foe! Avoiding me as if the sight of my face were a stab! Looking past me darkly! Ha! It's more than something transient! It's—what's the matter?”

She was pale. With the glass pitcher in one hand, she strained vainly with the other to open the tap of the faucet. “I can't open it, Albert! You must have shut it too tightly when you washed. I want some water for the table.”

“Are you weak suddenly?” He rose, strode sourly to the sink, twisted the tap open. “And as for him—” he stared ominously at the gushing water—“if he doesn't change, he'd better be careful! He'll find that I can change even more!”

There was a pause, a gathering of strain. Silently his mother set the pitcher on the table, went to the stove and began ladling out the steaming yellow pea-soup into the bowls. Stray drops that fell from the brown pancakes as she transferred them from the pot to the dishes hissed over the stove lids. The odor was savory. But David, glancing hurriedly at his father's gloomy face, resolved to eat more carefully than he had ever eaten in his life. So far these sombre eyes had scarcely rested on him; now he felt himself trying to contract within himself to vanish from their ken. And failing, concentrated on the frosted moisture of the glass pitcher and how each drop awaited ripeness before it slid.

His father reached for the bread—it seemed to ease the strain. Relieved, David glanced up. His mother came near, her face strangely sorrowful and brooding, incongruous somehow, dissociated completely from her task of carrying a platter of soup. She set it down before his father, and straightening, touched his shoulder timidly.

“Albert!”

“Hm?” He stopped chewing, twirled the spoon he had just picked up.

“Perhaps I should ask you this after supper when your mind is easier, but—”

“What?”

“You—you won't do anything rash? Please! I beg you!”

“I'll know what to do when the hour falls,” he answered darkly. “Don't let that trouble you.”

In spite of himself, David started. Against a sudden screen of darkness he had seen a dark roof, a hammer brandished over pale and staring cobbles.

“Pouh!” his father snorted, lowering his spoon. “Salt? Don't you use that any more?”

“Not salted? I'm sorry Albert! Everything I've done today has gone awry—even the soup!” She laughed desperately. “I'm a good cook!”

“What should trouble
you
so much?” His sharp gaze rested on David. “Has he been lost again or up to some new madness?”

“No! No! Not him—! Begin eating, child! Not him! I don't know! Nothing I did today had my eyes and my wits in the doing. Every hour brought some fresh confusion. It was one of those fateful days that make people superstitious. There's a handkerchief in the yard this very moment. Who knows what made me drop it!”

His father shrugged. “At least you were alone. There was no one watching you! No one prodding you with his eyes into blunders.”

“You mean—him again?”

“Yes! Him! Twice I didn't feed the sheet into the press just so. They wrinkled, crushed! The underpad was inked! I was ten minutes each time cleaning them! I tell you he gloated! I saw him!” He stopped eating, hammered the spoon on the table. “There's evil brewing inside him! He's waiting, waiting for something! I could feel his eyes on my back all day, but never there when I turned to face him! It took my mind off my work! I fed the press as though I were lame! I couldn't have done worse the first day I began! Now too soon! Now too late! Now just missing! And then the mussed paper caught in the roller—in the gummy ink. I had to take the whole thing apart! And every minute the feeling that he was watching me. Ha!” He breathed harshly. His lips writhed back and his words battered against the barred teeth. “It's more than I can bear! It's more than I'll stand! If he's waiting for something, he'll get it!”

“Albert!” She had stopped eating as well and was gazing at him panic stricken. “Don't—!” Her unsteady fingers closed her lips.

“I tell you he'll hear from me! I'm no lamb!”

“If—if it's that bad, Albert. If it doesn't change, and he's—he's that way—why don't you l-leave! There are other places!”

“Leave?” He repeated ominously. “Leave! So. But the first man I've ever trusted in this cursed land to treat me like a foe. The worst of all! Leave!” He stared at his plate bitterly, shook his head. “You're a strange one yourself. You've trembled every time I had a new job—trembled for me to keep it. I could read it in your face—you pressed me to be patient. And now you urge me to leave. Well, we'll see! We'll see! But when I leave he'll know it, never fear! And do me a favor. Take those plates away.” He nodded toward Luter's place. “It's as though someone were dead.”

XVI

TUESDAY afternoon, his mother's drawn, distracted face was too much for him to bear. Without asking her to wait in the hallway, he had fled into the street, and without calling to her, had come up again, alone. Neither Annie, who never hobbled past without sticking out her awl-like tongue, nor Yussie's reiterated, “Cry-baby,” nor the cellar-door at the end of the vacant hallway were half as painful to endure as the stiff anguish in his mother's face or the numb silence of the hours of waiting for his father. Again and again, he could almost have wished that by some miracle Luter would return, would be there beside his father when the door was opened. But his mother set only three places around the table. There would be no miracle then. She knew. Luter would never return!

And when his father came home, he came in alone again. The sight of him this evening was terrifying. Never, not even the night he had beaten David, did he radiate, so fell, so electric a fury. It was as though his whole body were smouldering, a stark, throbbing, curdling emanation flowed from him, a dark, corrosive haze that was all the more fearful because David sensed how thin an aura it was of the terrific volcano clamped within. He refused to speak. He scarcely touched his food. His eyelids, normally narrow, seemed to have stretched beyond human roundness, revealing the whole globe of the eye in which the black pupils almost engulfed the brown. He looked at no one. His mad, burnished gaze roved constantly above their heads along the walls as if he were tracing and retracing the line of the moulding beneath the ceiling. Between the hollow of mouth and chin, his twitching lips threw a continual flicker of shadow. There was a place above the stiff sickle nostrils that looked dented—so pinched and white they were. Only once did he break his silence and then only for a brief time in a voice as harsh and labored as a croak.

“Flour? Why? Two sacks of flour? Two? Under the shelf? Under the Passover dishes?”

She stared at him mutely, too bewildered, too panic-stricken to answer.

“Hanh? Are they going to wall you in? Or is the long lean year crouching?”

Her whole body before she answered quivered forward as though shaking off layers and layers of some muffling, suffocating fabric.

“Flour!” Her voice under the strain was high-pitched and hysteric. “A sale at the grocer's. Nev-Neven's Street! There in that market!” She trembled again, swallowed, striving desperately to calm herself. “I thought since we used so much, it would be wise to—oh!” She sprang to her feet in horror. “You mean why did I leave them under the Passover dishes! I'll take them away! This moment!”

“No! No! Leave them! Leave them! Leave them!” (David thought the fierce crescendo of his voice would never end) “Sit down. The mice won't get them!”

She sat down stunned. “I'll get them later,” she said dully. “I shouldn't have left them there. I can no longer think.” And taking a deep breath. “One is tempted to buy more than one needs these days, things are so cheap. Is there anything you'd like me to get you? Smoked salmon? Sour cream, thick almost as butter. They say they mix flour into it! Black olives?”

“My head is splitting.” His eyes were roving along the walls again. “Don't say more than you can help.”

“Can't I do something for you? A cold compress?”

“No.”

She shut her eyes, rocked slightly and said no more.

David would have whimpered, but dared not. The intolerable minutes unreeled from an endless spool of nightmare.…

By Wednesday afternoon, another and even more disturbing change had come over his mother. Yesterday afternoon and the day before, she had been impatient with him, unresponsive to his questions, distracted, disjointed in her answers. Now she listened to him with a fixity that made him increasingly uneasy. Wherever he walked about the kitchen, wherever he stood or sat, her eyes followed him, and there was something so fervent, so focused in her gaze that he found his own eyes not daring to meet hers. She did not chide him to-day for dawdling over his after-school bread and butter, or postponing the moment of having to go down. On the contrary, everything was reversed. This afternoon it was he who ate rapidly in order to be ready to go down sooner, and it was his mother who sought to delay him. “And what else?” She would ask. The moment he had completed narrating some incident in school. “And what else happened? What did you see then?” And always her tone had the same rapt, insistent note, and she hung on his every word with such a feverish hungered gaze that several times a curious shudder ran through him, a chill, as if the floor for a second had opened beneath him and he were plunging down a void.