United States or Singapore ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yonowsky was puzzled but grateful, and Aaron was grateful too. Month after month went by and the twins had exhausted the lists of the lecturer and had enjoyed several other ailments, when Leah and her father went to bring them home from their typhoid-fever holiday. "You've been having a hard time with these boys," the man at the desk said kindly.
When waiting milk-cans were thrown into cellars, when the wheels of momentarily deserted wagons were loosened, when pushcarts disappeared, when children bent on shopping were waylaid and robbed, when cats were tortured, horses' manes clipped, windows broken, shop-keepers enraged, babies frightened, and pit-falls set upon the stairs, the cry was always, "Them Yonowsky devils."
Yonowsky forced to cancel engagements at club or synagogue and to stay at home to "explanation them boys" to outraged neighbours. Aaron could still control them, but he was never brought upstairs now. How could Leah expect him to enjoy conversations carried on amid the yells of Algernon and Percival in freedom, or their shrieks in durance?
Yonowsky blossomed under the sun of Aaron's deference and learning into an expansiveness which amazed his daughter, and the men discussed the law, the scriptures, the election, the Czar, nihilism, socialism, the tariff, and the theatre. But here Mr. Yonowsky lapsed into gloom. He had not visited a theatre for seven years not since his wife's death. "And Miss Leah?" Aaron questioned.
For what were incompetent doctors, habit-backed dresses, wavering husbands, or impetuous lovers to Leah Yonowsky, who had assumed all the responsibilities of a woman's life with none of its consolations? Of course she had, to some extent, failed in the upbringing of her brothers, but she had always looked forward hopefully to the time when they should be old enough to be sent to school.
Leah could do nothing with them. Mr. Yonowsky made no effort to control them, and Aaron Kastrinsky was not always there. Not half, not a quarter as often as he wished, for Leah promptly turned away from all his attempts to make her understand how greatly she would gain in peace and comfort if she would but marry him. They would move to a larger flat and he would manage the boys.
And the betrothal of Leah Yonowsky to Aaron Kastrinsky was signed and sealed immediately. It was the week before Christmas, and the First-Reader Class had, almost to a man, decided on the gifts to be lavished on "Teacher."
Under ordinary conditions Leah might have been forced to nurse her brothers through their less serious disorders, but there was a butcher shop on the ground floor of the Yonowsky tenement, and the by-laws of the Board of Health decreed that, such being the case, the children should be removed for nearly all the ills to which young and ill-nourished flesh is heir.
Two weeks later the little emissaries of love were in sorry case. The "pimples everywheres" appeared, the ambulance reappeared, the twins disappeared. The cleaning and polishing were resumed, Aaron invited to supper, Mr. Yonowsky pledged to deliver a lecture on "The Southern Negro and the Ballot," and a stew of the strongest elements set to simmer on the stove.
Yonowsky had grown daily more silent and morose, and Leah had been less and less able to cope with "them devil boys." A room high up in a swarming tenement had been the grave of her youth and pleasure.
Word Of The Day