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Updated: June 14, 2025
So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South Park Avenue. A pleasant thing, life. And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does. Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might have taken warning. That was because he had said so little.
He brought her pound boxes of candy tied with sly loops and bands of gay satin ribbon which she carefully rolled and tucked away in a drawer. He praised her cooking, and teased her with elephantine playfulness, and told her that she looked like a chicken in that hat. Oh, yes, indeed! Mrs. Mandle was a spoiled old lady.
When Hugo brought his wife a gift he brought one for his mother as well. "You don't need to think you have to bring your old mother anything," she would say, unreasonably. "Didn't I always bring you something, Ma?" If seventy can be said to sulk, Ma Mandle sulked. Lil, on her way to market in the morning, was a pleasant sight, trim, well-shod, immaculate.
They were inclined to cling over-long to a favourite leather reticule, scuffed and shapeless as an old shoe, but they could hold their own at bridge on a rainy afternoon. In matters of material and cut Mrs. Mandle triumphed. Her lace was likely to be real where that of the other three was imitation.
Ma, whose marketing costume had always been neat but sketchy, would eye her disapprovingly. "Are you going out?" "Just to market. I thought I'd start early, before everything was picked over." "Oh to market! I thought you were going to a party, you're so dressy." In the beginning Lil had offered to allow Ma Mandle to continue with the marketing but Mrs. Mandle had declined, acidly.
Brunswick would say, shaking her head, "if I had ever thought that I would live to see the day when I had to depend on strangers for my comfort, I would have wished myself dead." "You wouldn't call your son a stranger, Mrs. Brunswick!" in shocked tones from Mrs. Mandle. "A stranger has got more consideration. I count for nothing. Less than nothing. I'm in the way.
As ladies-in-waiting, flattering yet jealous, admiring though resentful, she had Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Brunswick, and Mrs. Wormser, themselves old ladies and erstwhile queens, now deposed. And the crown jewel in old lady Mandle's diadem was my son Hugo. Mrs. Mandle was not only a queen but a spoiled old lady. And not only a spoiled old lady but a confessedly spoiled old lady.
As she grew older Hugo regularly lied to her about the price of theatre tickets, dainties, articles of dress, railway fares, luxuries. Her credulity increased with age, shrewd though she naturally was. It was a second blooming for Ma Mandle. When he surprised her with an evening at the theatre she would fuss before her mirror for a full hour. "Some gal!" Hugo would shout when finally she emerged.
He turned: "It's Miz' Merz. She says her little Minnie went by at six and saw a light in the house. She Hello! What?... She says she wants to know if she's to save time for you at the end of the month for the April cleaning." Mrs. Brewster took the receiver from him: "The twenty-fifth, as usual, Miz' Merz. The twenty-fifth, as usual. The attic must be a sight." Old lady Mandle was a queen.
"But when the right one comes along he won't know dumplings from mud." "Oh, a man of forty isn't such a " "He's just like a man of twenty-five only worse." Mrs. Mandle would rise, abruptly. "Well, I guess you all know my son Hugo better than his own mother. How about a cup of coffee, ladies?"
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