United States or North Korea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household. When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch of new beets. So strong is usage.
The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle. Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them a bond indissoluble.
His food, somehow, seemed to agree with him better than it used to. It was because Lil selected her provisions with an eye to their building value, and to Hugo's figure. She told him he was getting too fat, and showed him where, and Hugo agreed with her and took off twenty-five burdensome pounds, but Ma Mandle fought every ounce of it. "You'll weaken yourself, Hugo! Eat!
Gone, too, was Polish Anna, with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day scrubber. But Lil.
Ma Mandle, at breakfast, had always had a long and intricate story to tell about the milkman, or the strawberries that she had got the day before and that had spoiled overnight in the icebox. A shame! Sometimes he had wanted to say, "Let me read my paper in peace, won't you!" But he never had.
Her eyes were red-rimmed behind the powder that she had hastily dabbed on, but she smiled bravely. "Come on, Mother," she said. "It'll cool you off." But Ma Mandle shook her head. "I'm better off at home. You run along, you two." That was all. But the two standing there caught something in her tone. Something new, something gentle, something wise. She went on down the hall to her room.
Goldwater, Pinchas added zestfully. 'They say she has a Yiddish accent, Elkan ventured again. The table roared louder. 'I have heard of Yiddish-Deutsch, cried Pinchas, 'never of Yiddish-Français! Elkan Mandle was frozen. By his disappointment he knew that he had been hoping to meet Gittel again that his resentment was dead. But the hope would not die.
It was very hot to-night. Now and then there was a wisp of breeze from the lake, but not often.... How red Lil's eyes had been ... poor girl. Moved by a sudden impulse Ma Mandle thudded down the hall in her bare feet, found a scrap of paper in the writing-desk drawer, scribbled a line on it, turned out the light, and went into the empty front room.
Hugo learned to dance and became marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man. "Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother," Lil would say. "Sure!" Hugo would agree, heartily. "Come along, Ma. We'll show you some night life." "I don't want to go," Ma Mandle would mutter. "I'm better off at home. You enjoy yourself better without an old woman dragging along."
Hugo's salary was a comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his savings.
Word Of The Day