Max was fussing with the rug in the parlor. The children were gamboling from room to room, testing the faucets, the dumb-waiter
"Get avey from there!" Dora shouted. "You'll hurt yourself. Max, tell Lucy not to touch the dumb-vaiter, vill you?"
"Children! Children! What's a madder vitch you?" he called out from the parlor, in English, with a perfunctory snarl. Presently he came into the living-room. "Well, are you satisfied with your new palace?" he addressed me in Yiddish. And for the hundredth time he proceeded to make jokes at the various modern "improvements," at the abundance of light, and at my new rank of "real boarder."
It is one of the old and deep-rooted customs of the Ghetto towns of Europe for a young couple to live with the parents of the bride for a year or two after the wedding. So Max gaily dubbed me his "boarding son-in-law
"Try to behave, boarding son-in-law," he bantered me. "If you don't your mother-in-law will starve you."
The pleasantry grated on me
Dora's ambition to learn to read and spell English was a passion, and the little girl played a more important part in the efforts she made in this direction than Dora was willing to admit. Lucy would tell her the meaning of new words as she had heard it at school, but it often happened that the official definition she quoted was incomprehensible to both. This was apt to irritate Dora or even lead to a disagreeable scene
If I happened to be around I would explain things to her, but she seemed to accept my explanations with a grain of salt. She bowed before my intellectual status in a general way, but since she had good reason to doubt the quality of my English enunciation, she doubted my Yiddish interpretations as well. Indeed, she doubted everything that did not bear the indorsement of Lucy's school. Whatever came from that sacred source was "real Yankee"; everything else was "greenhorn." If she failed to grasp some of the things that Lucy brought back from school, she would blame it on the child.
"Oh, you didn't understand what your teacher said," she would scold her.
"You must have twisted it all up, you stupid."