CHAPTER V
ONE evening, when the Shorniks and I were at Max's house, and Max and Ben were having their game of pinochle, the conversation between the women and myself turned upon Dora's efforts to obtain education through her little daughter. Encouraged by Sadie and myself, Dora let herself loose and told us much of Lucy's history, or, rather, of her own history as Lucy's mother. In her crude, lumbering way and with flushed cheeks she talked with profound frankness and quaint introspective insight, in the manner of one touching upon things that are enshined in innermost recesses of one's soul
She depicted the thrills of joyous surprise with which she had watched Lucy, in her infancy, master the beginnings of speech. Sometimes her delight would be accompanied by something akin to fright. There had been moments when it all seemed unreal and weird
"The little thing seemed to be a stranger to me," she said. "Or else, she did not seem to be a human being at all."
The next moment she would recognize her, as it were, and then she would kiss and yearn over her in a mad rush of passion
The day when she took Lucy to school—about two years before—was one of the greatest days in Dora's life. She would then watch her learn to associate written signs with spoken words as she had once watched her learn to speak.
But that was not all. She became jealous of the child. She herself had never been taught to read even Hebrew or Yiddish, much less a Gentile language, while here, lo and behold! her little girl possessed a Gentile book and was learning to read it. She was getting education, her child, just like the daughter of the landlord of the house in Russia in which Dora had grown up
"C-a-t—cat," Lucy would spell out. "R-a-t—rat. M-a-t—mat."
And poor Dora would watch the performance with mixed joy and envy and exclamations like: "What do you think of that snip of a thing! Did you ever?"
Lucy's school-reader achievements stirred a novel feeling of rivalry in Dora's breast. When the little girl could spell half a dozen English words she hated herself for her inferiority to her
"The idea of that kitten getting ahead of me! Why, it worried the life out of me!" she said. "You may think it foolish, but I couldn't help it. I kept saying to myself, 'She'll grow up and be an educated American lady and she'll be ashamed to walk in the street with me.' Don't we see things like that? People will beggar themselves to send their children to college, only to be treated as fools and greenhorns by them. I call that terrible. Don't you? Well, I am not going to let my child treat me like that. Not I. I should commit suicide first. I want my child to respect me, not to look down on me. If she reads a book she is to bear in mind that her mother is no ignorant slouch of a greenhorn, either."
A next-door neighbor, a woman who could read English, would help Lucy with her spelling lesson of an evening. This seemed to have established special relations between the child and that woman from which Dora was excluded
She made up her mind to learn to read. If Lucy could manage it, she, her mother, could. So she caused the child to teach her to spell out words in her First Reader. At first she pretended to treat it as a joke, but inwardly she took it seriously from the very outset, and later, under the intoxicating effect of the progress she was achieving, these studies became the great passion of her life. Whenever Lucy recited some new lines, learned at school, she would not rest until she, too, had learned them by heart.
Here are two "pieces" which she proudly recited to us: "The snow is white, The sky is blue, The sun is bright, And so are you."
"Our ears were made to hear, Our tongues were made to talk, Our eyes were made to see, Our feet were made to walk."
Her voice, as she declaimed the lines, attracted Lucy's attention, so she sent her and Beckie into the kitchen
"She doesn't know what a treasure she is to me," she said to us.
Then, after she finished the two verses, she remarked, wistfully,
"Well, my own life is lost, but she shall be educated."
"Why? Why should you talk like that, Dora?" Sadie protested, her fishy eyes full of tragedy. "Why, you are only beginning to live."
"Of course she is," I chimed in.
"Well," Dora rejoined, "anyhow, I am afraid I love her too much.
Sometimes it seems to me I am going crazy over her. I love
Dannie, too, of course.
When he happens to hurt a finger or to hit his dear little head against something I can't sleep. Is he not my flesh and blood like Lucy? Still, Lucy is different." She paused and then rose from her seat, saying, with a smile: "Wait. I am going to show you something." She went into the kitchen and came back, holding a tooth-brush in either hand. "Guess what it is."
"Two tooth-brushes," I answered, with perplexed gaiety
"Aren't you smart! I know they are not shoe-brushes, but what kind of tooth-brushes? How did I come by them? That's the question. Did I use a tooth-brush in my mother's house?"
She then told me how Lucy, coming from school one day, had announced an order from the teacher that every girl in the class must bring a tooth-brush the next morning
Sadie nodded confirmation
"Of course, I went to work and bought, not one brush, but two," Dora pursued. "I am as good as Lucy, am I not? If she is worth twelve cents, I am. And if she is American lady enough to use a tooth-brush, I am."
Lucy is not a usual name on the East Side. It was, in fact, the principal of the school who had recommended it, at Dora's solicitation. The little girl had hitherto been called Lizzie, the commonplace East Side version of Leah, her Hebrew name. Dora never liked it. It did not sound American enough, for there were Lizzies or Lizas in Europe, too. Any "greenhorn" might bear such a name. So she called on Lizzie's principal and asked her to suggest some "nicer name" for her daughter
"I want a real American one," she said
The principal submitted half a dozen names beginning with "L," and the result was that Lizzie became Lucy
Dora went over every spelling lesson with the child. It was so sweet to be helpful to her in this way. Lucy, on her part, had to reciprocate by hearing her mother spell the same words, and often they would have a spelling-match.
All of which, as I could see, had invested Lucy with the fascination of a spiritual companion
The child had not been at school many weeks when she began to show signs of estrangement from her mother-tongue. Her Yiddish was rapidly becoming clogged with queer-sounding "r's" and with quaintly twisted idioms. Yiddish words came less and less readily to her tongue, and the tendency to replace them with their English equivalents grew in persistence. Dora would taunt her on her "Gentile Yiddish," yet she took real pride in it. Finally, Lucy abandoned her native tongue altogether. She still understood her parents, of course, but she now invariably addressed them or answered their Yiddish questions in English. As a result, Dora would make efforts to speak to her in the language that had become the child's natural means of expression. It was a sorry attempt at first; but she was not one to give up without a hard struggle. She went at it with great tenacity, listening intently to Lucy's English and trying to repeat words and phrases after her. And so, with the child's assistance, conscious or unconscious, she kept adding to her practical acquaintance with the language, until by the end of Lucy's first school year she spoke it with considerable fluency
Dora tried her hand at writing, but little Lucy proved a poor penmanship-teacher, and she was forced to confine herself to reading. She forged ahead of her, reading pages which Lucy's class had not yet reached.
To take Lucy to school was one of the keen joys of Dora's existence. Very often they would fall in with Lucy's bosom friend
"Good morning, Lucy."
"Good morning, Beckie."
As she described the smiling, childishly lady-like way in which the little girls exchanged their greetings and then intertwined their little arms as they proceeded on their way together, Sadie's fishy eyes filled with tears
"Oh, how sweet it is to be a mother!" Dora said
"I should say it was," her chum and follower echoed, wiping her tears and laughing at once
There was a curious element of superstition in Dora's attitude toward her little girl. She had taken it into her head that Lucy had been playing the part of a mascot in her life
"I was a bag of bones until she was born," she said. "Why, people who are put into the grave look better than I did. But my birdie darling came, and, well, if I don't look like a monkey now, I have her to thank. It was after her birth that I began to pick up." She had formed the theory that the child was born to go to school for her mother's sake as well as her own—a little angel sent down from heaven to act as a messenger of light to her
Her story made a strong impression on me. "Max is not worthy of her," I reflected. I wondered whether she was fully aware what manner of man he was