Fannie Hurst

“ Take your feet down off the plush, Sadie."
"Oh yes, you heard, all right."
"'Ain't you got a good home here, Sadie? Everything in the world a girl could wish for! A husband as good as gold, like his poor dead father before him. 'Ain't we done everything, me and my Etta, to make you feel how—how glad we are to have you for our Hermie's wife?"
"Oh, I know, I know."
"What maybe we felt in the beginning—well, wasn't it natural, an only son and coming such a surprise—all that's over now. Why, it's a pleasure to see how grandma she loves you." ”

“ You should be proud of such a little momser for a son! Take him, and here you got back his birthday dollar. A feedle! Honest—when I think on it—a feedle!"
Such a rush of outrage seemed fairly to strangle Mr. Kantor that he stood, hand still upraised, choking and inarticulate above the now frankly howling huddle of his son.
"Abrahm, you should just once touch this child! How he trembles! Leon—mamma's baby—what is it? Is this how you come back when papa takes you out to buy your birthday present? Ain't you ashamed?" ”

“ Lipkind pushed back his but slightly tasted food, lines of strain and a certain whiteness out in his face. "It—it just seems awful, Clara, this going around in a circle and not getting anywheres."
"I'm at the end of my rope, I am."
"I see your point in a way, Clara, but, my God! a man's mother is his mother! It's eating up my life just as it's eating yours, but what you going to do about it? It just seems the best years of our life are going, waiting for God knows what." ”

“ Kantor's face, as she knelt there in the shapeless cotton-stuff uniform of poverty, through the very tenement of her body, a light had flashed up into her eyes. She drew her son closer, crushing his puny cheek up against hers, cupping his bristly little head in her by no means immaculate palms.
"He wanted a violin! It's come, Abrahm! The dream of all my life—my prayers—it's come! I knew it must be one of my children if I waited long enough—and prayed enough. A musician! He wants a violin! He cried for a violin! My baby! Why, darlink, mamma'll sell her clothes off her back to get you a violin. ”

“ Lipkind, beside a kitchen lamp that flowed in gracious light, knitted the long, quiet hours of her evening into fabric, her face screwed and out of repose and occasionally the lips moving. Age is prone to that. Memories love to be mumbled and chewed over—the unconscious kind of articulation which comes with the years and for which youth has a wink and a quirk.
A tiger cat with overfed sides and a stare that seemed to doze purred on the window-ledge, gold and unswerving of eye. ”

“ My poor little girl, don't leave me alone in the dark. I can't see; Sadie, I can't see no more. Promise me, Sadie, promise me, promise me!"
From Sadie Barnet's heart, weakening her like loss of blood, flowed her tears. She kissed the heart of Edith Worte where it beat like a clock beneath the high-necked nightdress; she made of her bosom a pillow of mercy and drew the head up to its warmth.
"I—I promise, Dee Dee, on her curl of hair. Sure I promise. Always will
I keep you with me, darling, always, always, so help me, always." ”

“ Pelz? Boss! Mr. Feist, glad to know you!"
What hundreds of thousands of men, seeming to despise, had secretly, in the organ-reverberating darkness of the motion-picture theater, yearned over Mr. Lester Spencer's chest expansion, hair pomade, and bulgeless front and shirt-front! When Lester Spencer, in a very slow fade-out, drew the exceedingly large-of-eye and heaving-of-bosom one unto his own immaculate bosom, whole rows of ladies, with the slightly open-mouthed, adenoidal expression of vicarious romance, sat forward in their chairs. ”

“ A boy that never in his life was out after midnight except to catch trains. A boy that never has so much as looked at a girl and could have looked at princesses. To have kept you all these years—mine—is it any wonder, son, I never stop praying my thanks for you? You don't believe Hancock, son, the way he keeps always teasing you that you should have a—what he calls—affair—a love-affair? Such talk is not nice, Leon—an affair!"
"Love-affair poppycock!" said Leon Kantor, lifting his mother's face and kissing her on eyes about ready to tear. ”

“ Left standing there, Goldstone was instantly solicitous of his wife, feeling along her arm up under the loose sleeve.
"It don't pay, Hattie, to hurt Kessler's feelings, and, anyhow, what's the difference just so we know who she's running with? It's like this house was a honey-pot and the boys flies."
She turned to him now with her voice full of husk, and even in the dark her face bleached and shrunken from its plumpness.
"You oughtn't to let her! You—hadn't the right! She's too young and too—sweet for a man like him. You oughtn't to let her!" ”

“ My own darling papa that's so terribly good. My own darling sweet mamma. Can't you see, darlings, a girl can't help it when—when—life just takes hold of her? I swear to you—I promise you that, when you come to know Lester as I know him you'll think him as fine and—and gorgeous as I do. Mamma, do you think your little Bleema would marry a man who doesn't just love you, and dad, too? It isn't like Lester is a nobody—a high-salaried fellow like him with a future. Why, the best will be none too good! ”

“ Sensenbrenner bent low, almost nose to her palm.
"I see," he began, his voice widening to a drawl—"I se-e a fellow about my size and complexion entering your life—"
To Miss Schump, her hand on Miss Kinealy's shoulder and her head peering over, the voice seemed to trail off somewhere out into infinitudes of space, off into bogs of eternity, away and behind some beyond.
"Gee! it's hot in here!" she muttered, no one heeding or hearing. "Sure hot. Whew!"
"Going on a long journey, and a fellow about my size and complexion is going along with you, and there's money coming—"
"Sure hot!" ”

“ Pelz held out a slow and rigid arm, one hand gripping, the other cupping Mr. Feist at the elbow.
"It's the finest compliment I could pay to any man on God's earth to say it, Feist, but if it's got to be that my little baby girl has grown up to an age where she—"
"She's already a year older than me when I married you, Roody."
"If it's got to be, then there's one man on earth I can give her up to with happiness. That man is you, Feist." ”

“ Here the sea air can become a sort of hot camphor-ice to the cheek, the sea itself a percolator, boiling up against a glass surface. Beneath the tin roofs of Ocean Avenue the indoor heat takes on the kind of intense density that is cotton in the mouth and ringing in the ears.
At one o'clock the jibberwock exteriors of Ocean Avenue begin fantastic signs of life. The House of Folly breaks out, over its entire façade, into a chicken-pox of red and green, blue and purple, yellow, violet, and gold electric bulbs. The Ocean Waves concession begins its side-splitting undulations. ”

“ Stay with me, Leon! Don't go away! The people at home got to be kept happy with music. That's being a soldier, too, playing their troubles away. Stay with me, Leon! Don't go leave me—don't—don't—"
He suffered her to lie, tear-drenched, back into his arms, holding her close in his compassion for her, his own face twisting.
"God! ma, this—this is awful! Please—you make us ashamed—all of us! I don't know what to say. Esther, come quiet her—for God's sake quiet her!"
From her place in that sobbing circle Esther Kantor crossed to kneel beside her mother.
"Mamma darling, you're killing yourself. ”

“ Then Miss Hoag turned to the right, a rail partitioning her from the highly popular spectacle of the Baron de Ross, christened, married, and to be buried by his nomenclature in disuse, Edwin Ross MacGregor.
"Hot, honey?"
The Baron, in a toy rocker that easily contained him, turned upon Miss Hoag a face so anachronistic that the senses reeled back. An old face, as if carved out of a paleolithic cherry-stone; the years furrowed in; the eyes as if they had seen, without marveling, the light of creation; even the hands, braceleted in what might have been portière-rings, leanly prehensile. ”

“ And yet, when Miss Bloom smiled, which upon occasion she did spontaneously enough to show a gold molar, there were not only Hypatia and Portia in the straight line of her lips, but lurked in the little tip-tilt at the corners a quirk from Psyche, who loved and was so loved, and in the dimple in her chin a manhole, as it were, for Mr. Samuel Lipkind.
At six o'clock, where the wintry workaday flows into dusk and Fifth Avenue flows across Broadway, they met, these two, finding each other out in the gaseous shelter of a Subway kiosk. ”

“ Twenty-five years it's my home, the home where I had prosperity and good treatment, the home where I had happiness with your papa and where he lies buried, but I can't give you to fight against my own, Sammy—to be murdered by your own—my sister what never in her life harmed a bird—my child and her children—cousins—against each other. My beautiful country what I remember with cows and green fields and clover—always the smell of clover. It ain't human to murder against your own flesh and blood for God knows what reason!"
"Mamma, there is a reason it—"
"I tell you I'm a good American, Sammy. ”

“ By six o'clock the shades were drawn against the dirty dusk of Allen Street and the oilcloth-covered table dragged out center and spread by Esther Kantor, nine in years, in the sturdy little legs bulging over shoe-tops, in the pink cheeks that sagged slightly of plumpness, and in the utter roundness of face and gaze, but mysteriously older in the little-mother lore of crib and knee-dandling ditties and in the ropy length and thickness of the two brown plaits down her back. ”

“ Men red with laughter pounded their plates. The rhythmic convulsion passed down the prostrate line, forty-eight little feet twinkled a grand finale, and the curtains swung, then opened, remaining so.
The line of twenty-four danced down and across the wide hair-line that separates life and stage, butterflies sipping from table to table. The cabaret was done. Lights resumed, and the business of food and drink.
Mr. Loeb flung out an arm, pulling awry a carefully averted pink sash.
"Say, little Jingle Bells, you and your friend!" ”

“ Kantor took to rocking his head between his palms.
"Oi—oi! The mother is crazier as her son. A moosician! A fresser, you mean. Such an eater, it's a wonder he ain't twice too big instead of twice too little for his age."
"That's a sign, Abrahm; geniuses, they all eat big. For all we know, he's a genius. I swear to you, Abrahm, all the months before he was born I prayed for it. Each one before they came, I prayed it should be the one. I thought that time the way our Isadore ran after the organ-grinder he would be the one. ”

“ At seventeen Leon Kantor had played before the crowned heads of Europe, the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved head of a South Sea prince. There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from the molar tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a blue-enameled snuff-box incrusted with the rearing-lion coat-of-arms of a very royal house.
At eighteen came the purchase of a king's Stradivarius for a king's ransom, and acclaimed by Sunday supplements to repose of nights in an ivory cradle. ”

“ MR. FEIST: The old lady certainly holds her own, don't she? Honest, I'd give anything if I knew how to talk to her a little.
"No, Mr. Feist, mamma's breaking. Every day since her stroke I can see it more. It nearly kills me, too. It's pretty lonesome for her, up here away from all her old friends. Outside of my husband and Bleema, not a soul in the house talks her language except Sol and Etta when they come over."
"She's my nice darling grandma," said Miss Pelz, suddenly pirouetting up from her chair around the table, kissing the old lips lightly and then back again, all in a butterfly jiffy. ”

“ Sure, when a man like Jerry Beck comes along with a carriage-check instead of a Subway-ticket I can thaw up to him like a water-ice, and I ain't ashamed of it, neither."
They turned into a narrow aisle of street lined with unbroken rows of steep, narrow-faced houses. Miss Worte withdrew her arm sharply and plunged ahead, her lips wry and on the verge of tremoling.
"When a girl gets twenty, like you, it ain't none of my put-in no more. Only I hope to God your mother up there is witness that if ever a woman slaved to keep a girl straight and done her duty by her it was me. ”

“ How much more daringly than my poor pen would venture, did life, all of a backhanded, flying leap of who knows what centrifugal force, transcend for Stella Schump the vague boundaries of the probable. ”

“ I never want to see a 'roof,' or a music-show, or a cabaret again to the day I die. He knows I'll fit in home like a goldfish in its bowl. Life made a mistake with me, and it's going to square itself. ”

“ A genius like you could so easy get excused, Leon. Give it up. Genius it should be the last to be sent to—the slaughter-pen. Leon darlink—don't go!"
"Ma, ma—you don't mean what you're saying. You wouldn't want me to reason that way! You wouldn't want me to hide behind my—violin."
"I would! Would! You should wait for the draft. With my Roody and even my baby Boris enlisted, ain't it enough for one mother? Since they got to be in camp, all right, I say, let them be there, if my heart breaks for it, but not my wonder-child! You can get exemption, Leon, right away for the asking. ”

“ In the model-room, a long, narrow slit, roaringly ventilated by a whirling machine, lined in frocks suspended from hangers, and just wide enough for two very perfect thirty-sixes to stand abreast, August fell heavily. So heavily that occasionally a cloak-model, her lot to show next December's conceit in theater wraps, fainted on the show-dais; or a cloth-of-gold evening gown, donned for the twentieth time that sweltering day, would suddenly, with its model, crumple, a glittering huddle, to the floor. ”

“ OATS FOR THE WOMAN That women who toil not neither do they spin might know the feel of fabrics so cunningly devised that they lay to the flesh like the inner petals of buds, three hundred and fifty men, women, and children contrived, between strikes, to make the show-rooms of the Kessler Costume Company, Incorporated, a sort of mauve and mirrored Delphi where buyers from twenty states came to invoke forecast of the mood of skirts, the caprice of sleeves, and the rumored flip to the train. ”

“ My father died when I was five, Clara, and no matter what my feelings are to you, there's no power on earth can make me quit having to be him as well as a son to my mother. Maybe it sounds softy to you—but if I got to pay with her happiness for—ours—then I never want happiness to the day I die. ”